Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia

modernwiki.app

231–240 of 426 posts

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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hard and often done wrong- mobile phones are usually high dpi and have gotten quite large, so it can be hard to distinguish between a large phone and half a desktop screen. Some people get quite annoyed by being bumped into a mobile experience when you resize your window from fullscreen on a laptop.

> This is hard and often done wrong- mobile phones are usually high dpi and have gotten quite large, so it can be hard to distinguish between a large phone and half a desktop screen. A tablet could be easily confused, or a phone in landscape mode, too, but for a phone in portrait mode this seems a bit hard to imagine, because DPI is taken into account when converting the display width into CSS pixels, so even a phone…

You're right, and it's certainly a solvable problem but one that often is not solved correctly is my point. You may have to also introduce a (nonstandard) viewport tag to prevent mobile browsers from laying out the page at a much higher resolution and then zooming/shrinking on you https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_m... If you don't, you may falsely conclude from manual testing that you need large breakpoints for mobile.

Also, many times mobile breakpoints don't look at the device orientation and pick numbers like 800px, to capture landscape orientation on medium sized phones or something (I'm not sure where this number comes from to be honest). This obviously breaks the two windows side by side case on laptops but is a top result for me if you google the arcane syntax for how to target mobile browsers with a media query.

I am not 100% sure what all the pitfalls are with the current interface, but they exist often enough for me to run into them semi-frequently on smaller laptops.

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

#233

I discovered the other day that the mobile version of Wikipedia _while on desktop_ is AMAZING. Check this out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager It's nicely justified for reading. Superfluous interface is almost entirely eliminated compared to desktop view. It's just such a clean, elegant view for reading a Wikipedia page.

I totally agree!

This came up in a recent HN post so I published a user script I had written to automatically switch to the mobile version. You can also switch manually between mobile and desktop with ⌘ + M or ctrl-M. If you've switched to desktop and click on a link, it stays in desktop mode (it would be jarring otherwise if it kept flipping between modes). You can also edit the page with ⌘ + E or ctrl-E (opens in desktop mode since the mobile editor is pretty limited).

Install it here: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/431384-switch-to-mobile-wi...

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

#234

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.

This problem isn't limited to Windows 7/2008 or XP. It affects Win10 too.

>especially when the font is merely ugly in a cosmetic sense, and not unreadable

Eh, you won't go very far with this attitude in any design team.

Also, anyone who tried to manually craft font-family fallback path are already making effort. You can literally choose to not assign any font. Actually, it probably works better: most of browsers have sensible default (which often times is system font) already.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting. What are the bandwidth considerations for this? I had the impression that many ISPs make self-hosting impractical on normal household plans, but then I've never looked into it seriously.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

God yes this is annoying. TV episode summaries are in wide tables too and it's excruciating to read on mobile. These are mostly freeflowing text, not statistics, and there's no benefit to being put in a table. What is with the over-tabulation on Wikipedia?

I in general prefer tables but yeah having summary of TV episodes makes no sense and has been one of my pet peeve of Wikipedia formatting for a while.

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

#238

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

Reader mode is nice when it works, but since it’s hueristics-based I find it often either misses important content like images and code blocks that should be included with the article, or includes text that shouldn’t be there.

Even if it selects all the right elements, syntax highlighting doesn’t work which is an issue for me since a lot of the articles I read involve code.

These are issues with every reader mode I’ve tried – iOS Safari, iOS/desktop Firefox, desktop Chrome.

I wish there were a standard CSS media type that sites could implement, like `@media reader`, to help specify which elements should be included and to support things like syntax highlighting.

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

#240

I discovered the other day that the mobile version of Wikipedia _while on desktop_ is AMAZING. Check this out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager It's nicely justified for reading. Superfluous interface is almost entirely eliminated compared to desktop view. It's just such a clean, elegant view for reading a Wikipedia page.

What they need to do is put the TOC on the collapsible sidebar.
Post reply on HN