So it should be applied to HN too :)
Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
331–340 of 426 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> This is already the behavior of Wikipedia mobile pages.
No, it's not. The behavior of the mobile pages is always mobile-optimized no matter what.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#333Earlier 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 best way to do it would be to not redirect at all but instead simply serve the different layout at the same URL using the same criteria they already use to redirect. (Or, of course, they could use something like CSS media queries for a responsive design with a single set of code!)
There's no reason for them to have a different URL for the mobile views (it should be a cookie or session state if the user explicitly overrides, otherwise automatic) and there IS a reason that Wikipedia is basically the only major site still in existence that doesn't serve up their mobile-designed view on the same URL. Yes, `m.` was a huge trend back in the days of "mobile" meaning "a crappy J2ME browser", but it's not anymore and for damn good reason!
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just jumping into this now but you're not really listening to what the parent is saying. You seem to be acknowledging their point but then ignoring what they're saying. No one is talking about what should happen. They're saying that, as you've confirmed, m.* is a separate resource from en.* because they exist as 2 separate pages on wikipedia.org. On the en.* page, people on mobile are incorrectly redirected to m.…
I understand all of that and still disagree with the claim that mobile readers should never share a Wikipedia URL containing on the "m." subdomain. I simply do not agree. They got to that URL probably without every explicitly asking for a mobile-specific page, so they ought to freely share that URL. Moreover, this "mobile" design is in fact more responsive than the "desktop" design, and some people might even prefer…
No one is saying that mobile readers shouldn't ever share a URL on the "m." subdomain (despite them, quite literally, saying that). The criticism is that Wikipedia even has 2 separate resources for the same article and that the default behavior on "m." is to share the mobile resource while that's not the same case for the "en." subdomain (or other language variants). The only thing being said is that it should be consistent or it should be seamless - "en." always takes you to desktop and "m." always takes you to mobile or both should take you to the same page and the page should be responsive to the device you're using at the time. When users are saying "don't share the 'm.' page", they're only saying that because it doesn't exhibit the behavior of the "standard" page (which I'm only calling "standard" because that's how it was stated despite the fact that I don't agree that's a proper name for it).
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#335Earlier 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.
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!
Not necessarily: the real-world size matters too. Desktop-sized UI is hard to hit on a touchscreen when shrunk; meanwhile mobile-sized UI wastes space when enlarged on a desktop monitor.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#336I don't get this. If you want it to be narrower, make your browser window narrower. And by the way, you don't need an extension for the rest of the stuff, either. Wikipedia already supports per-user custom styling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_style
it's an off the shelf one click solution that gets me a more readable wikipedia i have a huge 4k monitor and always open many browser tabs at once, some tabs I don't want the window to be narrow on, and others might be wikipedia with this when I switch to my wikipedia tab i can just read it and it's very pleasing to the eye
Hmm, well I don't think it's quite one-click, in fact I think it would take fewer clicks to do it on-Wikipedia: click a link like this and then press Publish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=edit&title=Speci...
(Note: the theme here was picked at random from MediaWiki's `Manual:Gallery of user styles`, so... I disclaim any implication that it's a good theme. In fact, it must be bad - the link for this theme is to `en.m.wikipedia.org` !!!)
I hope you know that your browser can have multiple windows.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also a big problem where the mobile layout will tend to make controls huge to present a reasonable size touch target. This is unnecessary on the desktop, and may even result in less information fitting on screen than before switching to the mobile layout.
Thats a fun one to solve! @media (hover: none) and (pointer: coarse) { That allows the dev to select for devices that do not have a mouse and such rely on touch targets, to increase the sizing. I've been implementing this myself recently in our web application, while still allowing us to change the layout to fit the narrow width! I'm sure there are some devices it doesn't fit perfectly for though. This stuff is capit…
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#338For folks who appreciate elements from this redesign, I'd love to humbly suggest checking out the Wikipedia iOS app from the Wikimedia Foundation. The app supports 4 reading themes, is privacy friendly, includes: truly private reading history, trending articles, a persistent TOC on iPad, on this day in history, language and multilingual support, in the news, random articles, bookmarking and folder-ing capabilities, a…
This app is one of my very faves and one of the first I install on a new phone. Just wanted to post to say thank you for putting so much thought into the design - getting lost in articles, creating reading lists to come back to later, being able to switch languages on the fly - it feels like being in the library as a kid again going through Britannica hardcovers, except with a better interface and search instead of an index. :)
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#339OP, 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 .
> less timely, more timeless. I'm not sure if this is a subtle reference,but one of the major competing skins for wikipedia is named timeless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=timeless (its often quite popular among people using phones who find the official mobile website frustrating)
Nope, just coincidence.
Re: Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia
#340Hamburger menu broken on Firefox 94.0.2 (64-bit) on M1 Macbook Air