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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

#281

Post by tshaddox »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #257
tshaddox wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't misunderstood. I simply disagree. If I am on a public web page of a particular resource I should be able to share the URL to anyone else. Neither my user agent nor the other party's user agent should matter. It is ludicrous (and in fact essentially impossible) to check how a URL behaves in every possible user agent before sharing that URL with someone. If I'm on the Wikipedia page for London, I ought to be…

> If I am on a public web page of a particular resource I should be able to share the URL to anyone else. Neither my user agent nor the other party's user agent should matter. This is how mobile wikipedia pages behave. What part of that do you disagree with? Share a mobile page's URL and the person following your link will see the same page you do, no matter what your user-agent is, no matter what their user-agent is…

Again, the point is that the non-mobile URL redirects to the mobile URL. You're not "sharing a mobile page's URL," you're just sharing the URL for the page you're on. You didn't choose to be on a mobile-specific page. And again, your user agent does matter, because that's how you got to the mobile URL in the first place. Returning HTTP redirects is not supposed to mean "here's a new URL that's different from the one you requested, oh any by the way you can't share this new URL." An HTTP redirect is supposed to mean "the resource you requested is now at a new URL."

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

#282

Post by busymom0 »

grishka wrote: post #230
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…

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.

> people keep designing desktop UIs as if there's a touchscreen or something

I think that also has to do with "more white space = more scrolling = more ads".

Reddit is a perfect example of this. When they "updated" their UI to the current one, they added a ton of extra white space which forced people to scroll longer, thus spending more time on the site and viewing more ads. They also use a ton of other dark patterns.

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

#284

Post by aembleton »

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…

I use the No More Mobile plugin to fix that: https://github.com/spixy/NoMoreMobile

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

#285

Post by busymom0 »

HellsMaddy wrote: post #238
shoto_io wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’v…

I recently worked on implementing readability in my Hacker News client app and here's the resources I found most useful. Basically, if once designs their site following the correct structure, then it works correctly for both reader mode as well as accessibility. These are "standards" which sites are supposed to follow but they don't unfortunately:

A very long read but this covers everything:

> How to Section Your HTML

https://css-tricks.com/how-to-section-your-html/

These are specifically important for accessibility users.

Another short read:

> HTML5 sectioning elements, headings, and document outlines

https://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201103/html5_sectioni...

And you can use Markup Validation Service to validate and get tips:

https://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input+with_options

Check out the excellent answer by Christian Kohlschütter on how readability works:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3652657/what-algorithm-d...

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

#286

Post by keithnz »

Waterluvian wrote: post #195

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.

for me, that's way worse, I much prefer to get full width, on my 32 inch monitor, it looks nicer on the default website, and fits way more stuff without needing to scroll. If I want a similar layout for "reading" I'll just use reader mode in the browser and get a very similar layout.

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

#287

Post by thaumasiotes »

namdnay wrote: post #229
thaumasiotes wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

This is already the behavior of Wikipedia mobile pages.

> 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?

This, on the other hand, is already the behavior of Wikipedia's normal pages.

The mobile page will give you what you asked for, and the normal page will give you what it thinks you probably want. These are both approaches that you could argue for.

But I can't understand why everyone is trying to argue that the give-you-what-you-want approach is actually, if you think about it hard enough, the give-you-what-you-asked-for approach.

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

#288

Post by xemdetia »

duderific wrote: post #242
grishka wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's basic typographic design philosophy around whitespace - your eye needs somewhere to rest, and narrow columns of text are just easier to read. I personally like ample padding and whitespace, and don't want wall to wall content that just looks like a jumbled mess.

I agree with these typography principles when they are applied to things that should be read from top to bottom and the entirety of the content actually consumed as a whole. There's just many circumstances that it is not appropriate and I would say an encyclopedia entry is not one of them. I want to be able to scan a lot of content without having to change pages to find where I want to start reading from. That and people are really abusing the modern typography principle to get me to scroll more and 'engage' rather than just convey the information in a nice way (most news sites and recipe sites are egregious) that I'm starting to get turned off by the style for the web even though it's based in good reasoning. For print it's still fine because you are also limited and also it's often a two-column layout which is still pretty efficient for scanning for key words or phrases while being easy to read. 'Above the fold' used to mean something but in current web so much content wants to apply these principles but also wants me to scroll ten miles get to the actual point of the content and it feels really disrespectful to me as the reader.

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

#289

Post by Dah00n »

johnchristopher wrote: post #170
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.

That extension doesn't change how the web is. The web is still the same whether you use client side CSS override or not. This is exactly how CSS and HTML were intended to operate and the kind of results to be expected. > But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work. How is that called ? A complimentsult ?

There's no insult in saying it isn't for me because ... but good job. Positive criticism can be useful too.

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

#290

Post by Dah00n »

surajs wrote: post #161
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.

Yeah this is great but I'd rather stick with the tightly wound tools at Wikimedia, they probably know what they're doing more than this anemic blasphemy

Why not be positive? Instead of insults you could give positive criticism. There's nothing positive gained from being negative.
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