Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

Post by keyb0ardninja » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

crocodiletears wrote: post #67

munificent wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's, uh, a pretty intense reaction to some curves. There is a long history of rounded corners in graphic design. In the real world, perfectly sharp edges do not exist. Even on the printed page, ink bleed tends to gently round all corners. This is a good thing, because sharp corners interact poorly with some parts of our visual system. Sharp corners in a design can be as jarring as extremely high contrast or satura…

I'm absolutely an advocate for corners that are rounded to a reasonable degree. As you stated, perfectly sharp corners can produce a harsh, inorganic aesthetic that can be distracting to users. Even very round corners can be contextually appropriate. There's a world of difference between a few pixels of roundness, and making your entire website look like a fisher-price toy. Round, organic designs can be complex and v…

Post by tshaddox » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

seppel wrote: post #165

thaumasiotes wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's kinda crazy that if I'm on my phone I can't just share a URL to a page with someone who happens to be using a desktop. > in my view a URL should be a locator for a resource that is agnostic of the user agent. You're not making sense. The mobile page has a dedicated URL. If you're browsing it, then sharing the URL will send anyone else to the same resource you're browsing, regardless of their user agent. Ev…

> You're not making sense. The use case is: I go to the standard wikipedia page, browse a bit, and then I want to give out links to the standard wikipedia page of a specifig article. This is currently not possible without editing the URL if you are on mobile. And I dont understand why wikipedia is refusing to fix this.

Post by thaumasiotes » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #183

seppel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're not making sense. The use case is: I go to the standard wikipedia page, browse a bit, and then I want to give out links to the standard wikipedia page of a specifig article. This is currently not possible without editing the URL if you are on mobile. And I dont understand why wikipedia is refusing to fix this.

Correct, and my claim is that there should be no such concept as "giving out a link to the standard Wikipedia page." 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. Th…

Post by kingcharles » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

jokoon wrote: post #137

I wish wikipedia would be better compartmentalized, with articles tagged for their academic importance, because it makes it very difficult to download and/or host wikipedia when it includes a lot of noise, like celebrities, tv shows, local events, etc. I guess that's what wikipedia portals are for? For example I would love to be able to download a wikipedia archive just for math, computer science or history, etc, jus…

Post by zamadatix » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #182

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…

What bothers me most about this is that if you go to www on a mobile device, it redirects you to m - that's great, and probably the "right" thing to do. There is probably a "View Desktop Version" link on the mobile page, somewhere. But if you go to the m subdomain on a desktop device, there's no easy way to get to the desktop version without manually changing the URL. If you can redirect from www to m, surely you can…