Documentation on how to integrate with “Reading view” in Internet Explorer 11

Question

How does Reading view in Internet Explorer 11 work? The only developer documentation I could find was pretty useless.

Answer 1

I couldn't find any documentation either. I found a page of mine that worked with Internet Explorer 11's Reading View and worked backwards from there. Here's what I found:

• You have to have a non-empty <title> element. It doesn't matter what's in it as long as there is at least one non-whitespace character.
• You also have to have a non-empty <h1> element. This will be used as the page title in the reading view. It doesn't have to match the <title>.
• After that, you need at least 700 characters of content.

With those findings, I created a minimal page for entering reading view:

<title>.</title>
<h1>.</h1>
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy

There are a couple other caveats:

• Images must be at least 400 pixels wide. Images in portrait orientation won't show up. Only JPEG images will show up. The first appropriate image on the page will be used as the banner image.
• A <pre> tag anywhere on the page will prevent you from entering reading view. (This seems like a bug to me.)

(Testing done with Internet Explorer 11.0.9600.16384 on Windows 8.1 build 9600.)