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Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

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

#221

Post by kingcharles »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #157
kitsunesoba wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like a failing on Microsoft’s part, at least for current versions of Windows. The bar for a viable system font has been raised and it’s their responsibility as an OS vendor to ensure the bar is met across localizations. As for old versions of Windows… well, one should probably look at their target market/user base. If your demographic is firmly Roman western use of system-ui is probably fine — as far as I’…

Those releases have been EOL for 10+ and 5+ years respectively. There are a number of free options. I don't see any reason to make any effort to support those folks, especially when the font is merely ugly in a cosmetic sense, and not unreadable.

My counter-argument would be that even if a platform is EOL, if it represents a serious chunk of your audience then you should probably do what you can to accommodate them. Especially if, as here, you might be able to fix it with a very simple change.

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

#222

Post by marginalia_nu »

dsizzle wrote: post #220
marginalia_nu wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I removed those entirely, as I very rarely use those. More often than not the links are pay walled and the references are books that may or may not even be in print. Maybe it's useful if you have a university library at hand but I don't so I simply live with the fact that some of the things I've read may be wrong. If you want to look up sources it's better to use the live wikipedia at any rate, since it will be…

Ehh, I would say it's useful to see the reference even if you don't follow the link, but I'm sure it also depends on the nature of the topic. Seems easy to just preserve that section, but, hey, it's your site. Maybe there's a cost aspect you're considering? On that note, I'm curious how much it costs to basically mirror all of Wikipedia, if you wouldn't mind sharing?

I do a lot of these design experiments. I have an idea such as "what if wikipedia was designed only with reading comprehension in mind" and then I see what taking it to the most ridiculous extreme does. Sometimes it pans out, like I'm fairly happy with this wikipedia mirror, sometimes it doesn't--like I have no logos or branding anywhere on my sites, that turned out to be a bit confusing.

My mirror clocks in at 21 Gb. I'm self hosting so there's no real money cost besides the one-time investment in hardware. A really chap person could probably host this off a raspberry pi attached to something like a Corsair Voyager and serve multiple requests per second.

There's some technical trickiness in actually storing the files in a file system, since most filesystems don't deal well with having millions of files in the same folder. So I've had to build a four-tier directory structure based on the hash of the file name to be able to store the files. They're stored in a structure like 31/444/781/225/foobar.gz.

I did some experiments storing them as BLOBs in a database, but I couldn't get it to work.

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

#224

Post by themacguffinman »

I honestly love the design, thank you! One design criticism I have is that you've completely eliminated any visual distinction around images and their captions, eg. in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#The_Ali_B... you have multiple images & captions below each other where it's not immediately obvious which image a caption belongs to: https://postimg.cc/18cPJXPt

Humble suggestion: add some background shading to visually group an image with its caption, mock eg: https://postimg.cc/hJLrJF9N

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

#225

Post by framecowbird »

shoto_io wrote: post #127
myself248 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 build…

Why not use Reader Mode? I love it and use it as often as I can

I love reader mode! It's saved the internet for me

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

#226

Post by grishka »

jitix wrote: post #74
nomemory wrote: post #24

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…

I got annoyed at this enough to write this tiny userscript:

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name         Redirect from mobile wiki to desktop
    // @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
    // @version      0.1
    // @description  try to take over the world!
    // @author       You
    // @match        https://*.m.wikipedia.org/*
    // @grant        none
    // @run-at       document-start
    // ==/UserScript==
    
    window.location.hostname=window.location.hostname.split(".")[0]+".wikipedia.org";

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

#227

Post by thrdbndndn »

sjdz wrote: post #128
thrdbndndn wrote: post #97

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,…

Interesting, thanks for that. I was under the impression that using "system-ui" was the way to go! I do plan to add font choice as a setting in a future version, so that will solve this.

Just to note, you can achieve having "system font" for all the major OSs without using "system-ui" keyword.

Actually, "system-ui" doesn't even do anything in Firefox on Windows right now (and it behaves exactly like -apple-system on MacOS), so you shouldn't rely on it anyway.

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

#229

Post by namdnay »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #138
jfrunyon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda strange that you think someone who is on a phone copying a link and sharing it with someone who is not on a phone, is the latter person "specifically ask[ing]" for the mobile page.

It's strange that when you ask for en.m.wikipedia.org, Wikipedia responds by giving you what you wanted? There is no way to interpret requesting a dedicated mobile URL other than as specifically asking for the mobile version of the page. Or are you saying Wikipedia should be aware that you got the link from your obnoxious friend? HTTP doesn't really allow for that.

You need to take a step back. The end user is not asking for https whatever, they’re asking to see the same Wikipedia page their friend saw, adapted to their screen. Whatever gets in the way of that is bad UX

I guess the best way to do it would be to redirect the user to the correct domain based on agent, if they haven’t already chosen an override?

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

#230

Post by grishka »

myself248 wrote: post #31
0des wrote: 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 build…

That, and the density. I like desktop UIs to be dense. They don't have to be sparse with ample padding like on mobile devices since you don't poke your fingers into your monitor. Yet somehow, people keep designing desktop UIs as if there's a touchscreen or something.
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