IE 11 Reading View - Did Microsoft just paint a big target on its back for every web producer?

IEBlog - Introducing Reading View in IE 11

Reading view is a new feature in Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 8.1 that helps you focus on the main content of the Web page you want to read. Reading view is a way to experience just the article or blog post you want to read, without the distractions of related (or unrelated) content surrounding the story. Find an article you want to read, switch to reading view, and settle into a great reading experience. When you’re done, just exit reading view to continue browsing on the site.

Reading view is a native feature of “immersive” IE – you don’t have to install anything extra – and it’s available for pages with a significant amount of text, in any language IE supports.

How to Use Reading View in IE 11

Using reading view is easy. Just click the reading view button in the address bar. If you’re a keyboard person, you can also use CTRL+SHIFT+R to put a page into reading view.

The reading view button will appear in the address bar for pages that have “article-like” content. If you don’t see it, it means that the page doesn’t work well in reading view.

To exit reading view, tap or click the button in the address bar again), or hit Esc. To go to the previous page, tap or click the back button, or back-swipe if you’re using a touch-enabled device.

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No more “Next, Next, Next…” links

There are many articles on the Web that contain multiple and separate pages content. That means you have to click a “Next Page” link to continue reading, sometimes again and again, if the article spans many pages – and then you have to wait for each successive page to load, thus interrupting your reading experience.

Reading view in IE 11 combines the primary content from all pages of an article into a single continuously scrolling page that works great on any device. No need to click those “next page” links. Instead you can just use your finger or your mouse to scroll as you read. You get to have full control the position of the text on the screen.

If you are using a wide-screened device, like a tablet or a large monitor, articles in reading view can display in a multi-column, horizontally scrolling page.

If you like to read on a tablet while holding it in portrait mode, or if IE is displayed side-by-side with another app window, articles in reading view will display in a single-column, vertically scrolling page. As a general rule, if the IE window isn’t wide enough to show two columns of text, then reading view will use a single-column, vertically scrolling layout.

How reading view works

Once a Web site is determined to be reading view eligible, reading view uses a number of heuristics to identify and then extract relevant content from the page, to create a new page (in memory). The Web is a big and dynamic space, and from an engineering perspective, our algorithm aims to retrieve the most relevant content for the largest number of reading view eligible sites. These heuristics look at HTML tags, node depth, image size, and word count to determine what content on the page is the “main” content.

We have put together an interactive Reading View Test Drive demo to provide more details on key rules used in the Reading View extraction algorithm. We hope these tips will help content managers and developers ensure their site looks great on reading view.

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Reading View Guidelines

Reading view is a new feature in IE11 that provides a focused reading experience for text-heavy pages, such as news articles and blog posts.

The logic that reading view uses to detect the main content on a page follows popular markup patterns for news and blog articles on the web. This Test Drive doesn’t cover all scenarios, however, the following guidelines will get you started in making sure your site works well with reading view. See the Reading View in IE11 blog post for more details on how Reading View works.

To see tips on how to ensure particular elements on a page display correctly in reading view, click any of the 3 tab “views”, then click element names in the left nav bar or click the elements themselves on the embedded page.

Um... wow. Is this what I think it is? While this looks like it might  a cool feature for some users, producers aren't going to be too happy, are they? They are forced to opt out, not in. Even as a blogger that kind of irks me. If my site and content was my business, I think I'd be pissed. This feels like old Microsoft, the we know better Microsoft.

Or am I over thinking this?