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

418 kepano 68 5/22/2025, 9:40:54 PM github.com ↗

Defuddle is an open-source JS library I built to parse and extract the main content and metadata from web pages. It can also return the content as Markdown.

I built Defuddle while working on Obsidian Web Clipper[1] (also MIT-licensed) because Mozilla's Readability[2] appears to be mostly abandoned, and didn't work well for many sites.

It's still very much a work in progress, but I thought I'd share it today, in light of the announcement that Mozilla is shutting down Pocket. This library could be helpful to anyone building a read-it-later app.

Defuddle is also available as a CLI:

https://github.com/kepano/defuddle-cli

[1] https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-clipper

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/readability

Comments (68)

tmpfs · 39d ago

Interesting as I was researching this recently and certainly not impressed with the quality of the Readability implementations in various languages. Although Readability.js was clearly the best, it being Javascript didn't suit my project.

In the end I found the python trifatura library to extract the best quality content with accurate meta data.

You might want to compare your implementation to trifatura to see if there is room for improvement.

acrophobic · 38d ago

> ...it being Javascript didn't suit my project.

If you're using Go, I maintain Go ports of Readability[0] and Trafilatura[1]. They're actively maintained, and for Trafilatura, the extraction performance is comparable to the Python version.

[0]: https://github.com/go-shiori/go-readability

[1]: https://github.com/markusmobius/go-trafilatura

derekperkins · 35d ago

We've been active users of go-trafilatura and love it

breadchris · 38d ago

this is what i came here to see, thanks!

fabmilo · 38d ago

reference to the library: https://trafilatura.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

for the curious: Trafilatura means "extrusion" in Italian.

| This method creates a porous surface that distinguishes pasta trafilata for its extraordinary way of holding the sauce. search maccheroni trafilati vs maccheroni lisci :)

(btw I think you meant trafilatura not trifatura)

thm · 38d ago

Been using it since day one but development has stalled quite a bit since 2.0.0.

winddude · 38d ago

It's a bit old, but I bench marked a number of the web extraction tools years ago, https://github.com/Nootka-io/wee-benchmarking-tool, resiliparse-plain was my clear winner at the time.

creakingstairs · 38d ago

I was just looking at obsidian web-clipper's source code because I've been quite impressed at its markdown conversion results and came across Defuddle in there. I'll be using for my bespoke read-it-later/ knowledge-base app, so thank you in advance :D

Tsarp · 38d ago

Been using the obsidian clipper since it was out and this is a really neat. The per website profile based extraction is awesome.

Even if you are not a obsidian user, the markdown extraction quality is the most reliable Ive seen.

audessuscest · 38d ago

thanks for the tip!

jeanlucas · 38d ago

Obsidian Web Clipper is a great tool to turn chatGPT conversations in markdown, or to just print it (believe me, it is a user case)

emaro · 38d ago

Not sure about other clients, but Kagi Assistant directly offers to save a conversation as Markdown. Using Obsidian's web-clipper is a good idea too though.

T0Bi · 38d ago

I just ask ChatGPT to provide the summary or whatever I need as a markdown file.

kouru225 · 38d ago

Is that a paid plugin?

jeanlucas · 37d ago

It is free and open source: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-clipper

binarymax · 38d ago

Really nice work. I appreciate the example with JSDOM as that’s exactly how I use readability, and this looks like a nice drop-in replacement.

Question: How did you validate this? You say it works better than readability but I don’t see any tests or datasets in the repo to evaluate accuracy or coverage. Would it be possible to share that as well?

kepano · 38d ago

Currently I am relying on manual testing and user feedback, but yes, I'd like to add tests.

Defuddle works quite differently from Readability. Readability tends to be overly conservative and tends to remove useful content because it tests blocks to find the beginning and end of the "main" content.

Defuddle is able to run multiple passes and detect if it returned no content to try and expand its results. It also uses a greater variety of techniques to clean the content — for example, by using a page's mobile styles to detect content that can be hidden.

Lastly, Defuddle is not only extracting the content but also standardizing the output (which Readability doesn't do). For example footnotes and code blocks all aim to output a single format, whereas Readability keeps the original DOM intact.

honodk123 · 34d ago

This looks great!

I would love to give Defuddle a try as a Readability replacement. However, for my use case I want to do in a Chrome extension background script (service worker). I have not been able to get Defuddle to work, while readability does (when combining with linkedom). So basically, while this works:

  import { parseHTML } from 'linkedom';
  ...
  private extractArticleWithReadability(html: string) {
      const { document } = parseHTML(html);
      const reader = new Readability(document);
      return reader.parse();
  }

This does not:

  import { parseHTML } from 'linkedom';
  ...
  private async extractArticleWithDefuddle(html: string) {
      const { document } = parseHTML(html);
      const result = new Defuddle(document);
      result.parse();
      return result;
  }

I get errors like:

- Error in findExtractor: TypeError: Failed to construct 'URL': Invalid URL

- Defuddle: Error evaluating media queries: TypeError: undefined is not iterable (cannot read property Symbol(Symbol.iterator))

- Defuddle Error processing document: TypeError: b.getComputedStyle is not a function

Is there a way to run Defuddle in a chrome extension background script/service worker? Or do you have any plans of adding support for that?

shrinks99 · 38d ago

I've been super happy with Obsidian Web Clipper! It's worked really well for me with the one exception of importing publish dates (which is more than forgivable !)

acrophobic · 38d ago

Is Mozilla's Readability really abandoned? The latest release (v0.6.0) is just 2 months ago, and its maintainer (Gijs) is pretty active on responding issues.

khasan222 · 38d ago

That codebase definitely leaves much to be desired, I’ve already had to fork it for work in order to fix some bugs.

1 such bug, find a foreign language with commas in between numbers instead of periods, like Dutch(I think), and a lot of prices on the page. It’ll think all the numbers are relevant text.

And of course I tried to open a pr and get it merged, but they require tests, and of course the tests don’t work on the page Im testing. It’s just very snafu imho

fabrice_d · 38d ago

This seems to be https://github.com/mozilla/readability/pull/853#issuecomment... and I think their expectations are pretty reasonable.

khasan222 · 38d ago

Meh, maybe I'm standing too close to the problem, Idk. It is always frustrating trying to use a tool, and it not work though. I know it's free and all, but then I feel like helping people make good contributions is paramount in maintaining and fixing bugs.

Clearly the comma thing is a bug, it's the lack of wanting to fix it actually that is a bit disheartening, and why I think it is a deadish repo

fabrice_d · 37d ago

I don't know how you can interpret "we'd really like to make sure that the patch works and that we don't break it in the future" as "lack of wanting to fix it", but you do you.

rcarmo · 39d ago

The Python analogues seem to be well maintained. I did my own implementation of the Readability algorithm years ago and dropped it in favor them, and I have a few scrapers going strong with regular updates.

kepano · 39d ago

Are there any in particular you can recommend?

khimaros · 39d ago

not parent, but this one looks maintained https://github.com/buriy/python-readability

novoreorx · 37d ago

I built a similar project called Substance [^0]. Unlike most readability tools that try to solve the problem once and for all, it takes a different approach. It provides a framework to define how each website should be handled, ensuring better results for each website covered.

[^0]: https://substance.reorx.com/

Andr2Andr · 38d ago

Serious question - who and why would be using this tool? What is the use case? In other comments I have only seen exporting ChatGPT conversations to md

rollcat · 38d ago

This is a library, not a tool. You can use it for a number of purposes:

- Providing "reader mode" for your visitors

- Using it in a browser extension to add reader mode

- Scrapping

- Plugging it into a [reverse] proxy that automatically removes unnecessary bloat from pages, for e.g. easier access on retro hardware <https://web.archive.org/web/20240621144514/https://humungus....> (archive.org link, because the website goes down regularly)

degosuke · 38d ago

I use LogSeq a lot - and having the option to scrape a website with only the text in MD seems like a great fit.

jonplackett · 38d ago

Does anyone know why readers don’t work for some websites where it looks like they should - ie normal article with lots of text.

You just get a completely white page (on the iPhone reader). Usually it’s a news website.

Is this the website intentionally obscuring the content to ensure they can serve their ads? If so how do they go about it?

miki123211 · 38d ago

Cookie and "we care about your privacy" banners are often the cause here, especially if you're in the EU / UK / possibly California[1].

On some websites, those are just modals that obscure the content, something that reader mode can usually deal with just fine, but on others, they're implemented as redirects or rendered server-side.

If reader mode doesn't work, dismiss those first and try again.

severusdd · 38d ago

This is very cool! Given how messy and busy many websites have become, we really need a robust markdown converter that lets readers focus on reading the content. Nice to see something stepping up where Readability left off.

Thank you for picking up this work :-)

busymom0 · 39d ago

In the playground, after I enter a url, I can't seem to figure out how to submit it to fetch the url? I tried pressing the return key on iOS keyboard but it didn't do anything. Am I missing something?

kepano · 39d ago

The input is there to test the url option — which I admit is a bit confusing, so I have removed it for now. I haven't found a good and free way to proxy requests from a GitHub page (yet).

ricardonunez · 38d ago

I’ll give it a try. I’m not happy with my current setup for markdown to HTML on the wysiwyg editor I’m using, this may provide better results if I go with my own tool bar and editor.

ulrischa · 38d ago

I have build something similar:https://devkram.de/markydown but with php. Easy for self hosting

inhumantsar · 38d ago

can confirm that readability seems to be on life support. I used it slurp, an obsidian plugin which serves the same basic purpose as web clipper, and always had a hard time getting PRs reviewed and merged.

i started working on my own alternative but life (and web clipper) derailed the work.

it's funny. somehow slurp keeps gaining new users even though web clipper exists. so i might have to refactor it to use your library sometime soon even though I don't use slurp myself anymore.

billconan · 39d ago

Are you using ai models behind the scenes? I saw Gemini and others in the code. I am asking mainly to understand the cost of using yours vs. readability. Thank!

kepano · 38d ago

No it's all rules-based. I think the code you're referring to is "extractors", which are website-specific rules that I'm working on to standardize the output from sites with comments threads (e.g. HN, Reddit) and conversational chats (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini).

pugio · 38d ago

I would love something which reliably extracted a markdown back/forth from all the main LLM providers. I tried `defuddle` on a shared Gemini URL and it returned nothing but the "Sign In" link. Maybe I'm using your extractor wrong? How are you managing to get the rendered conversation HTML?

bambax · 38d ago

I think most LLM APIs return markdown and the conversion md->html happens after; so if you query the API directly you get markdown "for free".

ahsd1 · 38d ago

Cool. Im looking for something similar but for stripping signatures and boilerplate disclaimers from html email. Could this work for that?

timdeve · 38d ago

Looks good, I'm gonna try to swap readability in my RSS reader with this.

And with Pocket going away I might have to add save it later to it...

90s_dev · 38d ago

Neat. With ~3 more lines of code, you could get a URL and render it in simpler HTML and be a full fledged replacement.

infogulch · 38d ago

Since it's written in javascript is there any chance it could be packaged as a bookmarklet?

khaki54 · 38d ago

seems pretty much perfect including obsidian clipper. Thanks!

revskill · 38d ago

Interesting that Markdown does not support form element.

miketromba · 38d ago

Excellent work. A modern alternative to readability was much needed. This is especially useful for building clean web context for LLMs. Thanks for open-sourcing this!

elcritch · 38d ago

I found LLMs are really good at taking a web page and transforming it to markdown. Well rather commercial LLMs like Claude and Gemini are.

Unfortunately I tried a bunch of hugging face mode on a I could run on my MacBook and all of them ignored my prompts despite trying every variation I could think of. Half the time they just tried summarizing it and describing what JavaScript was. :/

ioma8 · 38d ago

Tried it on some webpages, doesnt work well.

input_sh · 38d ago

A bit off-topic, but I'm very excited to see the launch of Bases! I've obsessively followed the roadmap for like a year awaiting this day and have been frequently disappointed to still see it stuck somewhere under "planned".

Not that I didn't already implement a read-it-later solution with Obsidian+Dataview, but this definitely makes things simpler!

jeanlucas · 38d ago

Didn't it release just some days ago?

sn0n · 38d ago

Bases?

input_sh · 38d ago

https://help.obsidian.md/bases

Note that I'm using a preview (catalyst) version, it will reach stable soon. I'm assuming kepano will submit it here then.

fkfyshroglk · 39d ago

For those not in the know: [Readability](https://github.com/mozilla/readability)

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