About this plugin
Reader’s Web Publisher allows you to publish your pages as Reader’s-Web-compatible documents.
What is the Reader’s Web?
Reader’s Web is a Web where authors provide content and readers control presentation. Pages from different websites look and feel the same, which improves readability and makes navigation consistent across sites. Standardized pages also enable features previously unavailable on the Web, like visible connections between passages of text in different documents.
The Reader’s Web is not the first system where authors provide content without controlling presentation. Social networks already work this way. The difference is that social networks transfer control from authors to platform owners.
The Reader’s Web transfers control to readers instead.
What this plugin does
The plugin can serve your WordPress content in three new document formats and can also host a full Reader UI directly on your site so visitors without a compatible app still get the full experience.
Document types:
- HDOC — a script-free, style-free XML document for text content. The main format of the Reader’s Web.
- CDOC — an SVG-based collage document.
- CONDOC — a connection-only document that loads a third-party page as its main content and annotates it with visible connections, without modifying the original page.
Display modes (configurable globally in Settings, overridable per-post in the editor):
- Embedded HDOC — your regular WordPress page is served as normal but includes hidden JSON metadata. Compatible apps detect it and render it as an HDOC when the document is loaded as a connected document.
- Embedded HDOC (forced) — same as above but compatible apps always render the HDOC view, even when the page is the main document (not a connection). Visitors without compatible apps see your normal site.
- Reader UI — WordPress serves a full Reader interface instead of your theme. Visitors get the Reader’s Web experience directly without needing an app or extension.
- Standalone document — WordPress serves the raw HDOC, CDOC, or CONDOC file at the post’s URL with no surrounding HTML. This will be useful if the Reader’s Web becomes so popular that browsers start supporting the new document formats.
Reader UI
When a post or page is set to Reader UI mode, the plugin replaces your WordPress theme with a built-in reader interface. This is the same interface used by the RW Reader browser extension, so the experience is consistent regardless of whether the visitor has the extension installed.
Currently, there are 11 color themes and 10 font sets, giving you 110 unique visual styles to choose from.
Comments
post=ID, supporting pagination and ordering. post=ID and supports replies. This allows compatible reader apps to display and post comments without loading the full WordPress comment system.
Proxy endpoint
When displaying connected documents, the Reader UI fetches pages from other sites through a server-side proxy at /sw-proxy/. This proxy is safe to use: before making any request to an external URL, the plugin verifies that the URL is explicitly listed as a connection of the current post. Arbitrary external URLs cannot be fetched through the proxy.
Static document files
condoc files directly in a static-documents folder in your WordPress site root. hdoc, which lets compatible apps intercept and render them.
Analytics
Standard WordPress analytics tools work normally on Embedded HDOC and Reader UI pages. When the RW Reader extension is active and replaces the page UI, existing analytics scripts continue to run: page view events are already sent before the extension takes over, and session-level tracking continues uninterrupted.
For analytics code that needs to run after the Reader UI is fully initialized, the plugin dispatches a swpReaderReady event on document. You can listen for it in any custom script:
url }); });
The event is fired at most once per page load regardless of whether the reader was initialized by the plugin or the extension.
Compatible apps
- RW Reader — a Chrome extension that shows visible connections between pages in your browser and renders Embedded HDOCs in a reader view.
- LZ Desktop — a standalone app for exploring and creating Reader’s Web documents.
Visitors without any compatible app will see your content normally on Embedded HDOC pages, or through the built-in Reader UI if you enable Reader UI mode.
Background
The Reader’s Web is inspired by Ted Nelson’s long-standing vision of hypertext. org.
Source Code
Development happens on GitHub. Bug reports and pull requests are welcome.