Across the first three issues, 145 of 208 referenced images reached the
page; 38 that had been downloaded, re-encoded and written into the EPUB
were never referenced by any chapter, and 69 became `[image: …]` lines.
Six independent causes, each verified against the real articles:
- **Entity-encoded URLs never matched their asset.** `prepare_body`
re-runs `ammonia::clean`, which writes `&` as `&`, and the tag
scanner that looks the asset up compared raw attribute text against a
URL a real parser had decoded. Every image with a query string lost.
`parse_attrs` now decodes entities.
- **Readability clobbers a working `src`.** Its lazy-image heuristic
copies any attribute containing `.jpg` over `src`, which on NPR meant
a `{width}` template (the CDN answers those with a grey square reading
"Image"), on Substack a JSON blob, on dfarq an entire `srcset` string.
Pages are now normalized before readability sees them: every `<img>`
is reduced to `src`/`alt`/`title` with the best candidate from the
lazy attributes, `src`, `srcset` and `<picture><source>`, so there is
nothing left for the heuristic to substitute. Candidates that cannot
resolve — braces, whitespace, quotes, `data:` — are rejected by shape
rather than by publisher.
- **Readability deletes `<button>` and its subtree**, taking lightbox
images with it and leaving the captions behind. Image-only wrappers
are unwrapped first.
- **SVG was undecodable**, so vector charts became placeholders. They
are rasterized with resvg, which the cover already depends on.
- **Relative URLs resolved against the pre-redirect URL**, 404ing every
image on an article reached through a shortener. `fetch_readable` now
reports where it landed.
- **The 12-image cap** silently truncated photo essays, and the images
past it were advertised as failures. Removed; the issue-wide byte
budget is the real backstop.
An image that still cannot be embedded is now dropped rather than
announced, unless its alt text is a real description — decorative rules,
spacers and dead links were generating most of the placeholder noise.
`examples/image_audit.rs` replays the pipeline over the articles of
published issues and reports what reaches the page. On issues 1–3:
208→214 images referenced, 145→214 shown, 69→0 placeholders, 38→0
orphaned assets. The three images still not embedded are a 14×14 favicon
and a 650×2 divider — correctly declined, and no longer announced.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
thalladaandClaude Opus 5
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