Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia is getting a new look

diff.wikimedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 529 posts

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#481

Post by hyperpape »

psychometry wrote: post #478
hyperpape wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dan Luu has repeatedly failed to find any good sources for this claim: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1115707741102727168 .

Ok, but does anyone really want to read at hundreds of chars per line? Just look at the comments here. It's pretty clear that there is a widespread preference for fewer. This makes sense, since typesetters figured all of this out long before CSS existed.

You just moved the goalposts!

You cited research, then when pressed on it, gave up on actually citing any, and just appealed to people's preferences. If this is really about preferences, that's what you should've said, rather than making a fake claim to have scientific backing.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#482

Post by davidivadavid »

bmn__ wrote: post #432
davidivadavid wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) People don't know their own needs until you show them what their options are. Are you familiar with the literature on optimal line length that is quoted in the OP? If so, good job. I think it's fair to say 99% of people aren't. Consequently, if you asked people if they wanted an optimal reading experience, then they would have to concede that they are not knowledgeable about what that means, and thus that they sho…

That argument completely falls flat if you consider the actual result : https://i.imgur.com/7mAQy5H.png It enrages me to no end that this is sold as an improvement. • Who wants to read four to five words per line? THIS LINE SIZE IS ACTUALLY UTTER ASS. • In the good design, it was easy to resize to window to make the line length narrower. However, in the bad design, there is no recourse to make the line length longer.

The "actual result" looks nothing like that in my browser, so I can't really judge, although I agree that it looks terrible on your screenshot (text overlapping in links, etc.).

However, the line length, while suboptimal there, is pretty commonly encountered — pick up a newspaper and look how many words fit in a column.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#483

Post by grumple »

TuringTest wrote: post #468
grumple wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware, thanks, I'm a developer. That makes the column width wider as well. What you want is a thin column and a large font size, and you can't expect regular users to zoom in.

Regular users won't have a 4k display, or they would have detected the problem in testing. If you have unusual requirements such as a very high ppi display, you can set a minimum font size in your client browser, just as the web was intended to be used since the beginning. The original idea of the web as a publishing medium was that visualization could be determined by the needs and preferences of the final user, and…

Interestingly, that does work on new wikipedia (good on them) but not on many other sites I tested and has some weird results in some places (for example, it doesn't change the regular text size on HN but makes the "reply" link larger). It seems this doesn't have the desired effect or support and could break things for general use. And unfortunately, as a web dev, I have to primarily work with default settings on.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#485

Post by epicide »

systemvoltage wrote: post #404
epicide wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also very good points. I'll admit I'm not up to speed with a lot of CSS, myself. I'll definitely be looking into how to better use columns. While I think frameworks can be helpful to keeping a standard look and feel to the web, I would definitely agree that they're often used as a crutch.

Personally (I would probably get shot by saying this) but responsive design is a real problem, it is not a feature, but its a bug - a horrible one. By appeasing to many screen sizes, we create worse UI for all 3 sizes because no one really designs them for each size separately. Widths are in percentages, flex layout allos collapsable columns and the whole thing is not built from ground up. Either the designer starts…

Overall, I agree it's a problem, but I see responsive design as a (perhaps poor) solution to the convergence of three more fundamental problems.

The first being screen size fragmentation. Most tablets fall into a similar size/scale category, so you can have buffers (kinda like how you were saying). However, there are still corner cases where (e.g.) a tablet in landscape mode happens to trigger a different size category. The fact that resolution helps in fingerprinting users is pretty indicative that fragmentation is a huge problem.

The second being the lack of a good way for a page to know exactly what type of device it's displayed on. There are hints/etc. to get close enough. However, it's still a fundamental truth of web development that the browser can always lie to you. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a design challenge regardless.

The third is less of a technical or even a design problem, but I personally think it's the worst. More and more, companies are making increasingly complex sites with no real thought to user implications. I believe this will always be true in a web where the real customers are ad companies and search engines and the user is the product.

On the lines of another point you've made, I'm not suggesting we give up; there are still plenty of ways we could and should improve designs and frameworks (you've outlined some really good ones).

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#486

Post by dexen »

>Our first change, a collapsible sidebar, allows users to collapse the lengthy menu found on the left side of each page

Through hiding, feature discoverability is hampered.

>Our second change introduces a maximum line width

I resize my browser for the optimum line width on my computer, taking into account monitor DPI, viewing distance, visual acuity, and other individual factors. Please don't make content on computer monitor as badly cramped as it is on mobile. One size does not fit all, and there's a reason computer is higher productivity than mobile.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#487

Post by apricot »

rtsil wrote: post #394
apricot wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France French and Canadian French are not that different and are certainly mutually intelligible, kind of like US English and Australian English. (Except of course if you're a rude Parisian and act like any accent except yours is undecipherable).

You can certainly understand them if you're talking with a Canadian, because you can always ask for clarifications. But my point is not about accent, it's about taking a Canadian translation on an online translation service and mistakenly using it in a French document if you're not a French speaker. Good luck having your French readers understand what's a balado (podcast), a Bazou (a car) or a Boucane (the smoke), an…

Un bazou doesn't mean a car, it's a slang word that means jalopy. In France French, one would say une guimbarde, and I suspect lots of Canadian French speakers wouldn't understand that word. Slang words tend to differ a lot from country to country, no matter the language. A translation service that translates car to bazou or guimbarde is broken, but this has nothing to do with Canadian vs. France French.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#488

Post by notdang »

amai wrote: post #480

I prefer the wikiwand layout, see e.g. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Albert_Einstein Zoomed in at 150% it looks really nice. It also allows to justify the text and has a dark mode. Just the performance could be a little bit better.

I see a blank page with js turned off, while wikipedia still works.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#489

Post by davidivadavid »

pferde wrote: post #460
davidivadavid wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I don't want to spend all day resizing my browser when I switch tabs? I want websites that are made to be read to optimize for legibility and comfort, not for "not wasting screen space." As I type this comment on HN, the right hand side of the text box where I type my comment is entirely empty. Should the text box be full-width so it fills the screen and doesn't "waste space"? Hell no. It would be a pain in t…

This is not at all about "dumbing down" or "information density", this is about choice and ability to consume content at one's own terms. If a website leaves the text width to the reader (or their user agent), everybody wins, because everybody can read the text at their preferred width. If, on the other side, a website tries to prescribe how wide the text should be, that choice is gone, and some readers inevitably lo…

Everybody can always read at their preferred width provided they do what's necessary to get there. Resize window. Modify CSS.

You can always do that.

My point is that the smart default is to minimize having to make any change. The question is what the smart default is.

Defaulting to full width text means that most of the time, on a large desktop monitor, I need to resize my window to adapt to the text (different font, font size, layout, etc.), so it doesn't meet that standard.

Using a maximum width solves the issue, unless you want, for some reason, to display text wider than is commonly considered comfortable (you can always resize your window to shrink it further if you need to).

Can you show me an example where you'd like to resize text beyond 10-ish words on screen?

I'm very curious about concrete use cases and what the result looks like (and why it's superior), other than the case indicated in the original article (i.e. logging, not long-form text).

I'm not interested in "taking choices away" from anyone. I'm interested in not wasting my time building custom CSS to avoid having bad reading experiences on websites I spend a lot of time on.

Maybe it comes down to what you think Wikipedia is as a product. I don't see it as an API that spits out unformatted content. I see it as an encyclopedia, and as such, expect it to provide the best reading experience for me out of the box, like I would expect from a printed encyclopedia.

So far, Wikipedia is at best mediocre when it comes to basic typesetting. I just wish it were better.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#490

Post by DHPersonal »

dirktheman wrote: post #431
waldofrank wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the comments about the importance of language links in the sidebar: if you look here you can see that the language links will be moved to a button/menu in the article header — https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme... The conclusions of the user testing show that people have a much easier time finding them in the new location.

Their test group for this feature consists of 8 to 9 people, with 5 in a control group. You'd think that for one of the most visited sites in the world, they'd have larger test groups?

Testing large amounts of people doesn’t always produce better results. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...
Post reply on HN