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Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

modernwiki.app

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

#104
post #74

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…

Install Firefox Redirector: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ Add a rule to redirect (https?://)?(\w+\.)m\.wikipedia.org(.*) to $1$2wikipedia.org$3 Then you never have to deal with mobile Wikipedia on desktop again. You can use this for other sites too, like forcing all uses of Reddit to always open in old.reddit.com.

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

#105

I 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.

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

#106
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…

Down the bottom there is a link to the desktop version of the site.

Whoa, thanks.

However, that link is totally in the wrong place, no wonder I could not find it. I just assumed there was no such link/button and always angrily removed the 'm.' from each URL.

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

#107

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 usually shy away from "modern redesign" but this one feels rapidly valuable both in legibility and usability. The chasing left side TOC is really useful. The typography is slightly fancy without trying to be in your face. The search (kbd /) is nice too. I'd motivate the author to experiment with more stuff around accessing categories and hyperlinks in the page.

Agreed with most of this stuff, but search on / (and even ctrl-f on some websites!) is horrible because it overrides the browser's shortcuts. When I press / I expect the Firefox quick find bar to come up, complete with highlighting and markers in the scrollbar and ctrl-{shift}-g to move between results and esc to exit search. Not some half baked JS search implementation or an unrelated search like in this extension - it searches for wiki pages, not text within the current page.

Fortunately this is pretty simple to disable with Greasemonkey (also 's' on github, though the userscript doesn't seem to work on Gitlab...).

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

#108
post #74

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…

> 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 expire or what, but I often end up clicking on Wikipedia links and getting the awful "desktop" design.

All of this is just to say that, yes, they shouldn't use separate "m." URLs, but it's just as wrong to get upset at mobile users sharing "m." URLs as it is to get upset at desktop users sharing URLs without the "m." Arguably if you expect all users to always share the most versatile URL, you should expect them to always share the "m." URL since it has a responsive design.

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

#109
Looking clean. One thing that bothers me when the width slider is adjusted to the highest two settings - content in the main #content element runs right against the navigation scrollbar (#wiki_contents). #content needs at least an extra 20px of padding (to 340px or 360px) on the left at the second highest width setting (5) to give it some separation, and 40px (to 360px) at highest width setting (6) to match the alternative right-side padding introduced at that level.

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

#110

Please never ever use system-ui in your CSS. A classic article about why: https://infinnie.github.io/blog/2017/systemui.html In this particular case, it totally ruined the fonts of Wikipedia for East-Asian (CJK) Windows users. Just in case the article itself isn't convincing enough, below is a list of some websites that have tried "system-ui" and then reverted it semi-immediately: Facebook/bootstrap, GitHub, Twitter,…

Thanks for sharing! I love system-ui and this is my first time hearing of this -- will definitely reconsider.
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