I dislike getting the search results in a pulldown. makes it harder to open them in their own tabs, also doesn't work so well if your connection is slow.
Confluence does this and it drives me nuts.
Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
251–260 of 426 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#252I'm too scared to install extensions, any other way to see your design? Looks cool, in any case.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#253I did not try the theme but from what I see you just lowered contrast (this famous grey on white). You are reducing usability for the sake of questionable aesthetics. From there I am uninterested to explore any further. Thanks for your efforts but I like my Wikipedia to stay the way it is now. Works fine.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#254Nice work! Now, by any chance, can you make a pre-modern web UI for other sites? Because that's actually what I am looking for...
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#255OP, thanks for making this, I bet it was fun to build. That being said, I want someone to do the opposite of what this does. Less chrome, less bytes over the wire, less predictive search, less "flatness?", less timely, more timeless .
Got you, fam. https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki-start.html (I built this mostly for myself, because I find it incredibly difficult to read text that has hyperlinks and images in the text)
That is very nice looking. But I want the hyperlinks because the information I want is often spread out over more than one page (often Wikipedia achieves more concision than a traditional encyclopedia by hyperlinking rather than defining the terms it uses). And I want references because otherwise the information is unreliable. And I often want images because they sometimes convey information better than any text ("an image is worth a thousand words").
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#256I recently discovered that if you're logged into Wikipedia, you can customize the UI completely. You can, of course, choose different themes. But you can also upload custom CSS and Javascript! Link to image of preferences page - https://ibb.co/Kbfh1QQ
Yeah I’m not actually sure why more people don’t know this.
Some Wikipedia pages use CSS classes to allow people to self-censor what they see - for example, this is the remedy provided to people who do not want to see images of Muhammad.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Regardless of what type of device I'm using, I should be able to share the URL for that page to someone else regardless of what type of device they're using. The URL should literally be the uniform locator of that resource and shouldn't contain any semantics about any particular user agent's device. As I just pointed out, and you somehow misunderstood, this is the exact behavior of the mobile page. It is not the be…
I haven't misunderstood. I simply disagree. If I am on a public web page of a particular resource I should be able to share the URL to anyone else. Neither my user agent nor the other party's user agent should matter. It is ludicrous (and in fact essentially impossible) to check how a URL behaves in every possible user agent before sharing that URL with someone. If I'm on the Wikipedia page for London, I ought to be…
> If I am on a public web page of a particular resource I should be able to share the URL to anyone else. Neither my user agent nor the other party's user agent should matter.
This is how mobile wikipedia pages behave. What part of that do you disagree with?
Share a mobile page's URL and the person following your link will see the same page you do, no matter what your user-agent is, no matter what their user-agent is, no matter what device you're using, no matter what device they're using.
This is the problem. The behavior you are looking for, of different people seeing different content according to their user-agent, is also provided, and it's provided by the standard page.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#258Wikipedia itself is also working on a new UI: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme... The English Wikipedia isn't one of the "early adopter wikis" but if you visit, say, the French-language Wikipedia you can see the changes (e.g., different width to improve readability).
Wow, that is shockingly bad. Different objects just floating in space without lines between them to visually differentiate them.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got you, fam. https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki-start.html (I built this mostly for myself, because I find it incredibly difficult to read text that has hyperlinks and images in the text)
That is very nice looking. But I want the hyperlinks because the information I want is often spread out over more than one page (often Wikipedia achieves more concision than a traditional encyclopedia by hyperlinking rather than defining the terms it uses). And I want references because otherwise the information is unreliable. And I often want images because they sometimes convey information better than any text ("an…
Regular wikipedia is still there if those are your preferences. I don't know, I've never check a single reference in over a decade of using Wikipedia. I don't have access to those references. Maybe you do, if so that's cool.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#260I hate to be the contrarian, but I'm confused by the positive remarks here. I find the interface looks like it was trying to force mobile design principles onto a desktop view. A lot of space seems wasted here and I can view less content at once. I don't find this useful personally.
One unique UI feature of Wikipedia is that it has tons of tables that are super wide. They look fine on a monitor with 1080p+ resolution, but reading such articles on mobile has always been horrible experience. Unfortunately, this "modern" UI (larger font, narrow width) causes the exactly same problem on desktop.
Sometimes when this happens, I rotate my phone 90 degrees so that the whole width of the table can be easily seen.