docs: convert readme to markdown

README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,182 @@
+# Htmldate: Find the Publication Date of Web Pages
+
+[![Python package](https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/htmldate.svg)](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/htmldate)
+[![Python versions](https://img.shields.io/pypi/pyversions/htmldate.svg)](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/htmldate)
+[![Documentation Status](https://readthedocs.org/projects/htmldate/badge/?version=latest)](https://htmldate.readthedocs.org/en/latest/?badge=latest)
+[![Code Coverage](https://img.shields.io/codecov/c/github/adbar/htmldate.svg)](https://codecov.io/gh/adbar/htmldate)
+[![Downloads](https://img.shields.io/pypi/dm/htmldate?color=informational)](https://pepy.tech/project/htmldate)
+[![JOSS article reference DOI: 10.21105/joss.02439](https://img.shields.io/badge/JOSS-10.21105%2Fjoss.02439-brightgreen)](https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02439)
+
+<br/>
+
+<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adbar/htmldate/master/docs/htmldate-logo.png" alt="Logo as PNG image" width="60%"/>
+
+<br/>
+
+Find **original and updated publication dates** of any web page. **On
+the command-line or with Python**, all the steps needed from web page
+download to HTML parsing, scraping, and text analysis are included. The
+package is used in production on millions of documents and integrated by
+[multiple
+libraries](https://github.com/adbar/htmldate/network/dependents).
+
+
+## In a nutshell
+
+<br/>
+
+<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adbar/htmldate/master/docs/htmldate-demo.gif" alt="Demo as GIF image" width="80%"/>
+
+<br/>
+
+### With Python
+
+``` python
+>>> from htmldate import find_date
+>>> find_date('http://blog.python.org/2016/12/python-360-is-now-available.html')
+'2016-12-23'
+```
+
+### On the command-line
+
+``` bash
+$ htmldate -u http://blog.python.org/2016/12/python-360-is-now-available.html
+'2016-12-23'
+```
+
+## Features
+
+-   Flexible input: URLs, HTML files, or HTML trees can be used as input
+    (including batch processing).
+-   Customizable output: Any date format (defaults to [ISO 8601
+    YMD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601)).
+-   Detection of both original and updated dates.
+-   Multilingual.
+-   Compatible with all recent versions of Python.
+
+### How it works
+
+Htmldate operates by sifting through HTML markup and if necessary text
+elements. It features the following heuristics:
+
+1.  **Markup in header**: Common patterns are used to identify relevant
+    elements (e.g. `link` and `meta` elements) including [Open Graph
+    protocol](http://ogp.me/) attributes.
+2.  **HTML code**: The whole document is searched for structural markers
+    like `abbr` or `time` elements and a series of attributes (e.g.
+    `postmetadata`).
+3.  **Bare HTML content**: Heuristics are run on text and markup:
+    -   In `fast` mode the HTML page is cleaned and precise patterns are
+        targeted.
+    -   In `extensive` mode all potential dates are collected and a
+        disambiguation algorithm determines the best one.
+
+Finally, the output is validated and converted to the chosen format.
+
+## Performance
+
+1000 web pages containing identifiable dates (as of 2023-11-13 on Python 3.10)
+
+| Python Package | Precision | Recall | Accuracy | F-Score | Time |
+| -------------- | --------- | ------ | -------- | ------- | ---- |
+| articleDateExtractor 0.20 | 0.803 | 0.734 | 0.622 | 0.767 | 5x |
+| date_guesser 2.1.4 | 0.781 | 0.600 | 0.514 | 0.679 | 18x |
+| goose3 3.1.17 | 0.869 | 0.532 | 0.493 | 0.660 | 15x |
+| htmldate\[all\] 1.6.0 (fast) | **0.883** | 0.924 | 0.823 | 0.903 | **1x** |
+| htmldate\[all\] 1.6.0 (extensive) | 0.870 | **0.993** | **0.865** | **0.928** | 1.7x |
+| newspaper3k 0.2.8 | 0.769 | 0.667 | 0.556 | 0.715 | 15x |
+| news-please 1.5.35 | 0.801 | 0.768 | 0.645 | 0.784 | 34x |
+
+For the complete results and explanations see [evaluation
+page](https://htmldate.readthedocs.io/en/latest/evaluation.html).
+
+## Installation
+
+Htmldate is tested on Linux, macOS and Windows systems, it is compatible
+with Python 3.6 upwards. It can notably be installed with `pip` (`pip3`
+where applicable) from the PyPI package repository:
+
+-   `pip install htmldate`
+-   (optionally) `pip install htmldate[speed]`
+
+## Documentation
+
+For more details on installation, Python & CLI usage, **please refer to
+the documentation**:
+[htmldate.readthedocs.io](https://htmldate.readthedocs.io/)
+
+## License
+
+This package is distributed under the [Apache 2.0
+license](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html).
+
+Versions prior to v1.8.0 are under GPLv3+ license.
+
+## Author
+
+This project is part of methods to derive information from web documents
+in order to build [text databases for
+research](https://www.dwds.de/d/k-web) (chiefly linguistic analysis and
+natural language processing).
+
+Extracting and pre-processing web texts to meet the exacting standards
+is a significant challenge. It is often not possible to reliably
+determine the date of publication or modification using either the URL
+or the server response. For more information:
+
+[![JOSS article reference DOI: 10.21105/joss.02439](https://img.shields.io/badge/JOSS-10.21105%2Fjoss.02439-brightgreen)](https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02439)
+[![Zenodo archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3459599](https://img.shields.io/badge/DOI-10.5281%2Fzenodo.3459599-blue)](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3459599)
+
+
+``` shell
+@article{barbaresi-2020-htmldate,
+  title = {{htmldate: A Python package to extract publication dates from web pages}},
+  author = "Barbaresi, Adrien",
+  journal = "Journal of Open Source Software",
+  volume = 5,
+  number = 51,
+  pages = 2439,
+  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02439},
+  publisher = {The Open Journal},
+  year = 2020,
+}
+```
+
+-   Barbaresi, A. \"[htmldate: A Python package to extract publication
+    dates from web pages](https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02439)\",
+    Journal of Open Source Software, 5(51), 2439, 2020. DOI:
+    10.21105/joss.02439
+-   Barbaresi, A. \"[Generic Web Content Extraction with Open-Source
+    Software](https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02447264/document)\",
+    Proceedings of KONVENS 2019, Kaleidoscope Abstracts, 2019.
+-   Barbaresi, A. \"[Efficient construction of metadata-enhanced web
+    corpora](https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01371704v2/document)\",
+    Proceedings of the [10th Web as Corpus Workshop
+    (WAC-X)](https://www.sigwac.org.uk/wiki/WAC-X), 2016.
+
+You can contact me via my [contact page](https://adrien.barbaresi.eu/)
+or [GitHub](https://github.com/adbar).
+
+## Contributing
+
+[Contributions](https://github.com/adbar/htmldate/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)
+are welcome as well as issues filed on the [dedicated
+page](https://github.com/adbar/htmldate/issues).
+
+Special thanks to the
+[contributors](https://github.com/adbar/htmldate/graphs/contributors)
+who have submitted features and bugfixes!
+
+## Acknowledgements
+
+Kudos to the following software libraries:
+
+-   [lxml](http://lxml.de/),
+    [dateparser](https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser)
+-   A few patterns are derived from the
+    [python-goose](https://github.com/grangier/python-goose),
+    [metascraper](https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/metascraper),
+    [newspaper](https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper) and
+    [articleDateExtractor](https://github.com/Webhose/article-date-extractor)
+    libraries. This module extends their coverage and robustness
+    significantly.

setup.py

@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
 
 def get_long_description():
     "Return the README"
-    with open("README.rst", "r", encoding="utf-8") as filehandle:
+    with open("README.md", "r", encoding="utf-8") as filehandle:
         long_description = filehandle.read()
     # long_description += "\n\n"
     # with open("CHANGELOG.md", encoding="utf8") as f:
@@ -64,6 +64,7 @@ def get_version(package):
     version=get_version("htmldate"),
     description="Fast and robust extraction of original and updated publication dates from URLs and web pages.",
     long_description=get_long_description(),
+    long_description_content_type="text/markdown",
     classifiers=[
         # As from http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=list_classifiers
         "Development Status :: 5 - Production/Stable",