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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

#271

Post by bawolff »

RyanGoosling wrote: post #163
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 does a different set of CSS make it _fast_?

It probably doesn't in this case, but there are cases where css can have significant performance implications. Different selectors take different amounts of time, various things can force re-laying out the page etc. Not to mention pointless animation.

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

#272

Post by bawolff »

greggsy wrote: post #193
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…

The default MediaWiki theme is available, along with a handful of others, if you create an account.

The default mediawiki theme (vector) is also the default wikipedia theme (on desktop).

If you don't have an account you can add ?useskin=skinname to end of url to trigger different skins.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin... and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin...

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

#274

Post by tim-- »

divbzero wrote: post #49

Is there a way for this to be implemented as a Mediawiki skin [1] instead of as a browser extension? Is installation of skins by users one of the challenges? [1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:How_to_make_a_MediaWik...

I don't think you can install random skins on the official Wikipedia site. I run a mediawiki install for a local tech group, and it would be fantastic to replace monobook with this layout.

sjdz, the work you have done putting this layout together is awesome!

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

#275

Post by emaginniss »

haolez wrote: post #3

Looks good, but I think the adjective "modern" to be overly aggressive towards other design trends. From what I saw, the design trend here is for a flat and rounded interface with dynamic searches.

Yeah, when I saw modern, I was worried that it meant I could continuously scroll through a dynamically loaded page of the entire contents of wikipedia

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

#277

Post by ndom91 »

Any chance you'd like to open source this? I'm really enjoying this as well so far, but there are a few small nits I'd like to address with a little PR :)

1. Left menu scroll bar defaults to the hideous browser default scroll bar. 2. When increasing the width of the content just a bit, it becomes left adjusted all of a sudden, hugging the left menu and leaving tons of room on the right.

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

#278

Post by abbe98 »

jcun4128 wrote: post #204

This is what I like about chrome extensions, you can modify things, store your own stuff, etc... I am curious I don't think Wikipedia does it/would do it but I have seen some sites break if you modify their DOM. I think including CSS overrides would be different but YT is an example where injecting something into their DOM has an error show up in console. Wondering if that was a concern for you.

MediaWiki actually got policies to ensure breaking changes to the DOM isn't introduced.

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

#279

Post by Wowfunhappy »

mattnewton wrote: post #169
dorianmariefr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think proper media queries breakpoints solve this

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.

I don’t understand those people at all. If my browser window is the width of a mobile phone’s screen, than a version of the website designed for that size is exactly what I want!
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