Show HN: Defuddle, an HTML-to-Markdown alternative to Readability

a year ago

Defuddle is a tool that removes unnecessary elements from web pages to make them easily readable.
It cleans up web pages by removing clutter like comments, sidebars, headers, footers, and other non-essential elements.
Defuddle aims to output clean and consistent HTML documents, useful for HTML-to-Markdown converters.
It can be used as a replacement for Mozilla Readability with differences like being more forgiving and providing consistent output for footnotes, math, and code blocks.
Defuddle extracts metadata from the page, including schema.org data, and uses mobile styles to guess unnecessary elements.
Installation is via npm, with Node.js requiring JSDOM for usage.
Defuddle returns an object with properties like author, content, description, domain, favicon, image, and more.
It is available in three bundles: Core, Full (with math equation parsing), and Node.js (optimized for Node.js environments).
Options include debug mode, URL of the page, markdown conversion, and selector removal settings.
Defuddle standardizes HTML elements, removes anchor links from headings, and standardizes code blocks, footnotes, and math elements.
Building the package requires Node.js and npm, with commands to install dependencies and build the package.

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