Reading view
This documentation is archived and is not being maintained.
Microsoft Edge provides a reading view for a more streamlined, book-like reading experience of webpages without the distraction of unrelated or other secondary content on the page. Reading view can be toggled on or off from the Reading view (book icon) button on the address bar or with Ctrl
+Shift
+R
. Reading view extracts the following metadata from a page:
- Title
- Author
- Date
- Publisher
- Dominant image(s)
- Captions of dominant image(s)
- Secondary images
- Main text content of the page
- Copyright
Users can then adjust the page contrast and font size from the Microsoft Edge Settings panel.
Here are details of the page metadata rendered by reading view.
To ensure Reading view renders your article's title:
- Include a
title
element in your header - Include a meta tag with
name="title"
- Match the title text in your article body with the content string of your meta tag. Pipes (
|
) in your content string prevent the reader view from becoming active, try using hyphens (-
) instead.
Reading View will look for an element with class = "byline-name"
. Best practice is to place the author name after the title and before the article body.
<div class="byline-name">Author name</div>
Reading view will render the publisher and date information together on the same line, with additional styling to highlight this information. The article's publishing date will render exactly as it appears in the string. Reading view does not convert to a specific date format.
If you have a date in your article body and would like Reading view to render it, assign the element containing the date with the class 'dateline'
:
<div class="dateline"> Wednesday, September 18, 2013 7:38 AM </div>
If you don't have a date in the article body but would like Reading view to render the date, use the meta tag name='displaydate'
:
<meta name="displaydate" content=" Wednesday, September 18, 2013 7:38 AM ">
Reading view will look for the Open Graph protocol "og:site_name"
to render the publisher information. It also looks for source_organization
and publisher
attributes in any html tag as a secondary indicator of publisher information on the page. The publisher text will be hyperlinked to the URL of page using the Reading view page hyperlink style.
<meta content="Name of organization source" property="og:site_name">
Reading view captures most raw images with width >= 400px and aspect ratio >= 1/3 and =< 3.0. Images that do not meet these dimensions may still be extracted, such as images that are smaller than 400px in width but have captions. The first eligible image becomes the dominant image of the article. The dominant image is rendered as the first piece of content and given full column width. All following images are rendered as inline images within the article.
Best practice is to place images in figure tags with no more than two nested figcaption tags.
To ensure that all the body text of your page is captured by Reading view, it helps to keep most of the article text the same font size and DOM depth. The reading view algorithm allows for some deviation from this rule so publishers can have the freedom to add emphasis to lines or words.
Reading view extracts and displays copyright information denoted by meta tags with name = "copyright"
, or if no meta tag information exists, a text node that contains the copyright (©
) symbol. Reading view displays copyright information at the end of the article main body, styled using a smaller font size than the main body text.
<meta name="copyright" content="Your copyright information">
If you feel your content is not a good fit for Reading view, you can use the following meta tag to opt out of this feature:
<meta name="IE_RM_OFF" content="true">
With this tag, the Reading view button will not appear in the address bar when your users view your page.