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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

#371

Post by ReaLNero »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #264
marcosdumay wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need to force you to migrate, the new site pushes people into mindless meme sharing only, and completely altered the contents of the site already.

I've had to banish a good 40+ subreddits off my feed manually using RES to just deal with the politics spam. And even then, browsing /r/popular is just awful. Elimination games. People blatantly asking for personal information from teenagers. "Tell me your favorite X and we will judge you" Dumb NSFW 'questions'. Repost bots for content from years ago. Misinformative titles. "Unpopular opinion" threads. It's a mountai…

I always stay away from /r/popular. The subreddits that appear there like /r/PublicFreakout are selected for display so you can get angered, join the echo chamber in the comments and boost engagement metrics.

Watching many of those short anger-inducting videos can make even a calm person change. The sort of stuff Reddit PMs have signed off on in the name of engagement is despicable.

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

#372

Post by account42 »

mattnewton wrote: post #231
iggldiggl wrote: post #211

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. 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 l…

You're goning to need tag for any reactive design with mobile browsers since otherwise the site will look completely different between browsers and browser versions as they use different rules for how to render sites.

The worst part of this is that simple mostly text sites without a fixed-with layout would look perfectly on mobile if this tag was the default but somehow mobile browser vendors thought it was better to hack around sites with table layouts by giving them a larger viewport (but still inconsitently scale the font sizes so you have to zoom in and out to read different parts).

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

#373

Post by account42 »

t-writescode wrote: post #303
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> If my browser window is the width of a mobile phone’s screen It's not, is the thing. I have a 23 inch screen for my 1080p screen. My phone has a 6ish inch diagonal. When I make a window 960 x 1080, that's still something like 10 inches across and 11 inches tall. It's sheet-of-paper sized. I'm perfectly comfortable reading that as it was designed for a desktop layout.

> I have a 23 inch screen for my 1080p screen. My phone has a 6ish inch diagonal.

Do you sit as close to your monitor as you hold your phone?

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

#374

Post by account42 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #309
dorianmariefr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think proper media queries breakpoints solve this

Even better: Don't have media queries breaking at some arbitraty widths at all, and have a design, which is responsive for all widths without breaking suddenly, orienting size of boxes depending on the content.

As soon as you have any kind of columns in your layout you need sudden breaks at some points, explicit or not.

I agree that you should prefer flow and size-to-fit but that does not mean that break points are never the right tool.

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

#375

Post by zuj »

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.

if I had to read anything longer than few minutes I immediately go to the mobile view. Much easier on the eyes.

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

#376

Post by account42 »

tshaddox wrote: post #108
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…

> It's OK to use m.* subdomains instead of reactive design but there should at least be redirects to the correct subdomains. I agree, although in the case of Wikipedia the "mobile" design is actually the one that is responsive. I want the "mobile" design on all browsers including my desktop. I believe you can actually set your default theme if you're logged into Wikipedia, but I don't know if their cookies eventually…

I disagree that the m. url is the most versatile because of the one-sided redirect.

Also the mobile site might be more responsive in the sense that it better scales down to narrower viewports but it does not scale up to make use of larger viewports by e.g. bringing back the sidebar and other links that are hidden behind dropdowns. That's a problem with many mobile-first designs - in reallity they are mobile-only designs.

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

#377

Post by account42 »

CobaltFire wrote: post #249
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…

Counterpoint to this: I’m career military and the fact that Wikipedia (and Facebook) have low bandwidth m.* redirects made life immensely easier on the limited internet in far off places. We really appreciated it being available.

Just checked the first acticle linked on the home page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_gunboat_Beli_Orao - 913.39 KB / 298.41 KB transferred

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_gunboat_Beli_Orao - 919.43 KB / 270.18 KB transferred

Not much of a difference. Would be better to spend time optimizing the desktop site for everyone.

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

#378

Post by account42 »

dpifke wrote: post #197
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…

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998

That seems to be about serving the different variants directly instead of the redirect when there really should only be one variant that makes the best use of any viewport size.

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

#380

Post by OJFord »

account42 wrote: post #373
t-writescode wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my browser window is the width of a mobile phone’s screen It's not, is the thing. I have a 23 inch screen for my 1080p screen. My phone has a 6ish inch diagonal. When I make a window 960 x 1080, that's still something like 10 inches across and 11 inches tall. It's sheet-of-paper sized. I'm perfectly comfortable reading that as it was designed for a desktop layout.

> I have a 23 inch screen for my 1080p screen. My phone has a 6ish inch diagonal. Do you sit as close to your monitor as you hold your phone?

Not GP, but yeah, about the same? From your phrasing I expect it's how close we hold our phones that differs though.
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