Instant View, Instant and Inaccessible

I love Telegram, and I like reading articles in Instant View. Reasons: speed, convenience, lack of advertising, but most importantly - the ability to create an IV for any site in ~ 5-10 minutes.

Did I say 5-10 minutes? Oh, I meant 2 years.

Speed

^{Comparison: Browser | Application | Instant view}

Instant View is fast. I understand that its speed is due to the fact that Telegram is already open, and it takes time to open a third-party browser / application. But it seems to me that IV is faster than AMP and Instant Articles.

However, the choice depends only on where you spend more time - in the messenger, browser or Facebook application.

Patterns

It is really possible to write a code for Instant View in 5-10 minutes. Just read the manual , see the XPath cheat sheet and press Ctrl + Shift + I. After you set the elements containing the body and title articles, trim excess with @remove



and that’s it.

 ~version: "2.1" #   Instant View body: //div[has-class("post__text")]
      
      

        
        
        
      

    
        
        
        
      
      

        
        
        
      

    
     

This code is enough to transfer all Habr to Instant View. However, many sites are not so simple, so in language IV there are variables, conditions and functions .

Publication

If you come across a site with simple markup, then the difficulties will begin here.

The only way to publish an article in Instant View is to make a link of the form https://t.me/iv?url=[]&rhash=[...]



, where you need to insert a link to the article and the rhash identifier of your Template.

Conveniently? Quickly? Handsomely? No no and one more time no. The resulting link is usually hidden in text, period or inextricable space. I even created a free bot that does this for the user.

At the same time, the site IV says that there is another way to get Instant View for your site - wait for the approval of your Template from the Telegram team. I sent my Templates ( 1 , 2 , 3 ). More than a year has passed - no reaction.

So what to do

The only way to get Instant View without crutches now is to go to the Competition IV website , click Add Domain and add your website.

2 years passed between the first and second Competitions, and the second Competition lasted one and a half times longer than announced ( commentary by the winner ). At such a rate, the forecast that you have to wait 2 years may be too optimistic.

And it is advisable not to change the layout after the Competition, because Instant View will simply stop working, and not the fact that it will be fixed.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, the development and popularity of the most high-speed Telegram technology is hindered ... Telegram itself. Your site will not receive Instant View, even if you yourself write the perfect code for this.

I see a solution in creating volunteer teams, as done with Translation and Support, or in increasing the number of employees working on IV.

I sincerely hope that the messenger will not stop supporting this technology and will become truly more convenient than AMP pages and RSS aggregators. Judging by yesterday's announcement of the competition for the creation of clustering and ranking algorithms for content, which will obviously be built into Instant View, the development will continue.

With my article, I just want to draw attention to this bottleneck, which greatly reduces the development potential of the entire platform.