| name | read-url |
| description | Extract clean, complete markdown from any web page — articles, docs, READMEs, blog/social posts, academic papers. Use this when fetching text content from a given URL. Also use when curl returns noisy HTML or WebFetch returns truncated, summarized, or refused results. Perfer this over WebFetch.
|
Read URL
Work down this fallback ladder in order. Each step is only tried when prior steps don't apply or fail.
Fallback ladder
- Raw
.md / .txt / plain-text URL → curl -sL <url> (already clean, no HTML to strip)
- Route lookup → grep
references/routes.md for the full hostname or its parent-domain suffixes. For an identifier or recognized platform, search by route key (for example RFC, DOI, MediaWiki, Discourse, WordPress, or Gitea/Forgejo). Use the matching route before falling through
- Docs page → try
curl -sL <url>.md. Mintlify and other docs platforms serve clean markdown on the .md route — if the response is text/markdown, you're done; otherwise fall through
- Blog / newsletter / multi-post index → try RSS first:
curl -sL <url>/feed (also /rss, /feed.xml, /atom.xml, /index.xml). Most static-site generators and CMS platforms expose one; RSS gives you clean <content:encoded> or <summary> bodies without chrome
- Generic site (articles, docs, tech blogs, unknown) →
npx defuddle parse <url> --markdown — see references/defuddle.md
- JS-rendered page (defuddle returns empty / skeleton-only content) →
$agent-browser skill
- Cloudflare / anti-bot protection (Turnstile, blocked responses, 403/503) →
$scrapling skill
- Still blocked and genuinely need this page → ask the user to open it and paste the content, or offer the
$chrome-cdp skill (requires explicit user approval first). Otherwise, give up and report the failure.
Bulk discovery
For whole-site ingestion, probe <site>/llms.txt (URL index) and /llms-full.txt (full corpus). Convention adopted by Mintlify, Cloudflare, Stripe, Next.js, and others. On 404, fetch the index page <site>/ instead.
For search within site, grep references/routes.md for the site, a rows tagged search: expose a dedicated search API for when you have a topic, not a URL. Otherwise run WebSearch or the $jina-ai skill with a site: filter, then fetch the result URL via the fallback ladder.
vs. WebFetch
This skill returns full page text (markdown), parsed locally — no summarization, no information loss. WebFetch routes through a remote small model that may summarize, refuse, or truncate; reach for it only when you want an AI summary, not the content itself.
When to bypass the ladder
- Need a quick AI summary → built-in WebFetch
- No specific URL yet, need to search → built-in WebSearch or
$jina-ai skill
