web-reading

Web reading: get clean text from complex pages

Plain HTTP fetch tools (e.g. the fetch MCP tool) download the raw HTML and strip tags. That fails on modern sites whose content is rendered by JavaScript (SPAs, infinite-scroll, app-shell pages): the raw HTML is an empty shell, so you get little or no real text.

Jina Reader (https://r.jina.ai/) renders the page in a real browser and returns clean Markdown of the main content. It is keyless (anonymous, rate limited) — no API key or config needed — so it works in any generated harness that has a URL-fetching tool.

When to use this

Use Jina Reader whenever a normal fetch of a page returns any of:

• empty or near-empty body, or only nav/menu/footer boilerplate
• "Please enable JavaScript", a loading spinner, or an obvious app shell
• garbled / truncated content that doesn't match what the page clearly contains
• a long, content-heavy article you want as clean Markdown

How to use it

Prepend https://r.jina.ai/ to the original URL and fetch THAT with your existing fetch / HTTP-GET tool:

https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com/some/article

For example, to read https://news.site/article/123, fetch https://r.jina.ai/https://news.site/article/123. The result is rendered Markdown of the page's main content.

Notes:

• Keep the original URL's scheme (https://...) after the prefix.
• It is rate limited when keyless; if you hit a limit or a page is anti-bot protected, say so and fall back to the plain fetch result rather than looping.
• If this harness has the jina-reader MCP server enabled (with a JINA_API_KEY), prefer its read_url tool instead — same engine, higher quota, more reliable.