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Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

modernwiki.app

31–40 of 426 posts

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

#31
post #6

OP, 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 .

Oh dang, yeah. An extension that makes the whole web look and work like the default Mediawiki skin would be glorious. And _fast_.

I miss windows having borders. Just dug up a registry hack (obscene that such a thing was needed) to force win10 to have window borders again, because I keep ending up in situations where I honestly couldn't tell where one ends and the other begins.

They spent decades researching and building interfaces with visual cues, and we spent decades tuning our reflexes to them. Then some whim of fashion decided that hiding all those cues was "smoother", and I want to choke someone.

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

#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 succeeds some initial ramblings about the origins of the word, or of its inventors, which does not lead to me understanding the word and makes my WP deep dives less pleasurable.

I want WP to solve this with NLP.

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

#36
Nothing is wrong with the existing wikipedia interface. In this case, in the course of making it 'modern', it was made worse (like most 'modern' things).

Please remember from design 101 that line and shape have meaning and can help the user understand the interface.

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

#37

From the screenshot: I absolutely adore the positioning of the table of contents. The design looks clean, utilitarian, and overall well executed. That being said - and this is more a critique of modern design - I absolutely hate the suffocating roundness of the element corners. It's an aesthetic that drips with overfamiliarity and a patronizing attitude. It's the visual equivalent of being put in a padded room, or ha…

As a person who designs web applications to look somewhat modern because that's what is now-days expected, whenever critics go to such extreme similes about modern web design and their hatred for it... it's such an extreme opinion I tune them out entirely. You can't cater to radicals.

Most people don't particularly care how things look, so long as they're reasonably familiar, well-ordered, visually inoffensive, and functional. After that, it's optimizing for performance metrics and ensuring that the client is happy with the aesthetic of the final product.

Client usually wants to emulate some elements of the latest aesthetic trend. Can't blame designers for what's ultimately a fashion trend. Especially when breaking from the trends and convention put you at risk of looking dated or driving away consumers.

Edit: some grammar

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

#38
Looks great, doesn't work for me:

* It seems to constrain the width to something even smaller than usual (800px?). I have 6000px of horizontal real estate, and while it would be mad to let text run to that length, the optimum is not what a phone can do. (I've tried to find out what "native" width is here, but I'm getting full-width no-constraint layouts with Firefox (no plugin, not logged in), 800px with the plugin (Chrome, logged in) and something in between (Safari, logged in).

* It hides links I regularly use behind menus (to the discussion page and version history).

I guess 9x% of people never edit Wikipedia and it might make sense to cater to them. But, then again, I'm not sure if it's the best idea to actively hide the fact that they could contribute. I also don't see as much of a difference to the mobile layout that is planned to slowly become default on desktop as well.

Edit: I found the slider to adjust page width. That's thoughtful!

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

#40
I like it! I'm not one of those people who fetishizes 90's to mid-00's design. Something like Hacker News has its charm but let's not pretend all sites from that era were usable. One thing that drives me mad in default Wikipedia is the line length. On a large monitor it makes text way less readable. Also having access to the table of contents on the side is way better than having to scroll back up.
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