documentation/docs/index.md

# Getting Started

## What is this

*txtdot* is a proxy that requests the page by the given URL,
extracts only useful data including text, links, pictures and tables,
and returns it as an HTML page with a minimalistic design
optimized for text reading.

*txtdot* increases the loading speed and reduces client's bandwidth usage
since no unnecessary code and no scripts are transfered.
Also, you won't see any advertisement (unless it's a static picture that is hard to detect as ads).
There are no trackers too.

## How it works

This project exists thanks to great Mozilla's
[Readability.js](https://github.com/mozilla/readability) library.
The initial idea was to process HTML with it on the server
so the client does not need to download and execute heavy JS,
doesn't need to use an adblock.

Readability performs its work very well in most cases.
But not always. For example, check any StackOverflow page or Google search results.

So [artegoser](https://github.com/artegoser) wrote the basis of the code
keeping in mind that we'll extend txtdot with other *engines*.
For now, engines are functions taking a URL as a parameter,
returning an object that contains extracted HTML and plain text, page title and language.
The object is rendered with ejs template (or, in `/api/parse`, just sent as JSON).

If an `?engine=` parameter wasn't passed, but txtdot found
that a specific engine is assigned to the requested domain,
for example, `"stackoverflow.com": stackoverflow`,
it uses that engine to process the URL.
Otherwise, the page is parsed with the engine assigned to `*` (it's Readability).