Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Meet the Mercury Web Parser—a new, general-purpose web API that works alongside our AMP converter

A little while ago Postlight launched an anything-to-Google AMP converter. We called it—the Postlight Mercury AMP Converter. More than 1,000 publications signed up for access, and tons of those are now using it to convert their content to AMP on-the-fly. So that’s good.

Inside of the AMP converter is an engine that looks at any web page and strips the page of anything but the content. So we wondered what it would be like to adapt that engine into a new API that would let anyone convert any HTML web page to a simpler, more accessible version that would be easy for a computer to manipulate.

Adam Pash is Lead Engineer, Postlight, and he led the effort to create a new API. Today he’s written about that new effort—which we call the Mercury Web Parser. It’s a very simple API that can be used to, um, parse the web. A simple utility tool for people who want to use and remix the content that’s out there. How could you use it?

Migrating legacy content into new CMSes. Migrations are notoriously time-consuming and filled with edge cases. You can use Mercury to quickly grab the content of a web page and put it into a new database. And that will work for millions of URLs.

Generating mobile experiences. We use the Mercury Parser to build great AMP pages. But AMP is not the end-game for Mobile. You can take your entire website, run it through Mercury, and build on the scaled-back version to create a mobile web (or app experience).

Creating new experiences for new platforms. The future is not just words on a screen. There’s a panoply of speaking, whirring, humming devices all of which need content-rich experiences. There’s Amazon Echo, SIRI, enhanced ebook formats — and using the Mercury Parser, your web content is ready for it.

And tons of other ways; the content on the web is amazing—and the Mercury Web Parser unlocks it. To learn more—read the rest of Adam’s post.