Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#211

Post by iggldiggl » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #169

dorianmariefr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think proper media queries breakpoints solve this

This is hard and often done wrong- mobile phones are usually high dpi and have gotten quite large, so it can be hard to distinguish between a large phone and half a desktop screen. Some people get quite annoyed by being bumped into a mobile experience when you resize your window from fullscreen on a laptop.

> This is hard and often done wrong- mobile phones are usually high dpi and have gotten quite large, so it can be hard to distinguish between a large phone and half a desktop screen.

A tablet could be easily confused, or a phone in landscape mode, too, but for a phone in portrait mode this seems a bit hard to imagine, because DPI is taken into account when converting the display width into CSS pixels, so even a phone cramming 1080 or 1440 or whatever amount of physical screen pixels into its display width should still come in at something like 300 to 400ish CSS pixels. Or am I misunderstanding something?

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#212

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

jitix wrote: post #74

nomemory wrote: post #24

I am one of those people who actually like Wikipedia the way it is. It's what I hoped the web to become. But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work.

I agree with you except the one pain point that Wikipedia still continues to use "m.*" sub-domains for displaying mobile content. I know most people exclusively use mobile these days but I use desktop browsers for reading more than 60% of the time and its really annoying to click on a Wikipedia link on HN/Reddit and having it open the mobile site on desktop. It's OK to use m.* subdomains instead of reactive design bu…

I dunno. Maybe it is different on a phone but on a tablet the desktop Wikipedia is better than the mobile Wikipedia.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#213

Post by ravenstine » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

I think having the sidebar on the right would be better design. Because the article should be the main focus, and we read from left-to-right, putting the sidebar on the left makes it harder for the eye to track back to the following line of the main article content.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#214

Post by ravenstine » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:16 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #195

I discovered the other day that the mobile version of Wikipedia _while on desktop_ is AMAZING. Check this out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager It's nicely justified for reading. Superfluous interface is almost entirely eliminated compared to desktop view. It's just such a clean, elegant view for reading a Wikipedia page.

I was skeptical but I just tried that and, yeah, it's actually pretty good on desktop.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#215

Post by Swizec » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #212

jitix wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you except the one pain point that Wikipedia still continues to use "m.*" sub-domains for displaying mobile content. I know most people exclusively use mobile these days but I use desktop browsers for reading more than 60% of the time and its really annoying to click on a Wikipedia link on HN/Reddit and having it open the mobile site on desktop. It's OK to use m.* subdomains instead of reactive design bu…

I dunno. Maybe it is different on a phone but on a tablet the desktop Wikipedia is better than the mobile Wikipedia.

+1 to this. My iPad is plenty big enough please show me the real Wikipedia. The redirect is incredibly frustrating.

On a phone, the mobile Wikipedia is perfect tho.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#216

Post by nomemory » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:18 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #170

nomemory wrote: post #24

I am one of those people who actually like Wikipedia the way it is. It's what I hoped the web to become. But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work.

That extension doesn't change how the web is. The web is still the same whether you use client side CSS override or not. This is exactly how CSS and HTML were intended to operate and the kind of results to be expected. > But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work. How is that called ? A complimentsult ?

Not at all a complimensult. I can appreciate the work of someone, if even I won't use it. I don't know how to put it otherwise.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#217

Post by jll29 » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

kreeben wrote: post #32

one of the worst things about the current WP GUI is that when you hover over a hyperlinked word with the expectation that your anxious yearning for the definition of that word be fulfilled you're often forced to click through to the actual page, because the popup lacks a concise enough representation of that word, because the definition could not be contained within that small a space, or, the definition of the word…

Certainly NLP could help here. In particular, there are two sub-areas concerned with document summarization and text simplification (e.g. remove relative clauses, split long/complex sentences), respectively, that could be useful in this case.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#218

Post by frosted-flakes » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

iggldiggl wrote: post #211

mattnewton wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hard and often done wrong- mobile phones are usually high dpi and have gotten quite large, so it can be hard to distinguish between a large phone and half a desktop screen. Some people get quite annoyed by being bumped into a mobile experience when you resize your window from fullscreen on a laptop.

> This is hard and often done wrong- mobile phones are usually high dpi and have gotten quite large, so it can be hard to distinguish between a large phone and half a desktop screen. A tablet could be easily confused, or a phone in landscape mode, too, but for a phone in portrait mode this seems a bit hard to imagine, because DPI is taken into account when converting the display width into CSS pixels, so even a phone…

You have it right.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#219

Post by frosted-flakes » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

stormbrew wrote: post #120

tshaddox wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's OK to use m.* subdomains instead of reactive design but there should at least be redirects to the correct subdomains. I agree, although in the case of Wikipedia the "mobile" design is actually the one that is responsive. I want the "mobile" design on all browsers including my desktop. I believe you can actually set your default theme if you're logged into Wikipedia, but I don't know if their cookies eventually…

I might be ok with "the mobile reactive version everywhere" if it didn't also lack a bunch of features. Not being able to easily get to the talk page to contextualize what you're reading makes the mobile site very frustrating.

Note that a link to the talk page has recently been added to the top of the mobile page.

Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

#220

Post by dsizzle » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #209

dsizzle wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, ha, I didn't even notice that. Ok, I like that! I was actually looking at the footnote links, and those do indeed seem to be missing entirely -- as well as the whole references section. Arguably that's more important than links to "definition" wiki pages, so it forms the basis for the knowledge (vs mostly just definitions).

Yeah, I removed those entirely, as I very rarely use those. More often than not the links are pay walled and the references are books that may or may not even be in print. Maybe it's useful if you have a university library at hand but I don't so I simply live with the fact that some of the things I've read may be wrong. If you want to look up sources it's better to use the live wikipedia at any rate, since it will be…

Ehh, I would say it's useful to see the reference even if you don't follow the link, but I'm sure it also depends on the nature of the topic. Seems easy to just preserve that section, but, hey, it's your site. Maybe there's a cost aspect you're considering? On that note, I'm curious how much it costs to basically mirror all of Wikipedia, if you wouldn't mind sharing?