I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Wikipedia design. I started making this for myself just because I wanted more of a "reader mode" like experience (narrower column, nicer fonts, dark mode etc). Then I got a bit carried away and implemented everything I could think of for a modern redesign of Wikipedia. Hope you like it!
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.
Thanks, glad you like it :) With the name, I was just thinking more in terms of "modernized"... as in, something more modern than the current Wikipedia design... but I get your point! I'll have a think about it.
You may be interested to know that Wikipedia has a page dedicated to such redesigns[1]. Perhaps there are some to draw inspiration from. Regardless, maybe it would be worth contributing to the list.
Thanks for that, I did actually come across that page during development when I was searching for redesign concepts. There's a few dead links there, but it seems redesigning Wikipedia is a very popular pursuit for designers as there are tons of designs out there (on dribbble etc). I've tried to incorporate all the best ideas from these into this extension, but I'm open to any suggestions for improvements! I will also try adding this one to the list.
OP, 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.
The only difference I notice between this and Wikipedia is that I can't hover over a link and get a pop-up description of the page. Is that all or is there more to it?
> https://wikiless.org - a free open source alternative Wikipedia front-end focused on privacy. No JavaScript or ads. All requests go through the backend, client never talks to Wikipedia. Prevents Wikipedia getting your IP address. Self-hostable. Anyone can setup a private or public instance.
From the README [0] and code, I'd wager that the only thing happening is that JS has been filtered out, that the CSP rules are significantly stricter and that a dark mode has been added.
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 building interfaces with visual cues, and we spent decades tuning our reflexes to them. Then some whim of fashion decided that hiding all those cues was "smoother", and I want to choke someone.
No problem, I did it by accident, and you can also drag the windows to the corners and overshoot to have them, top is full, left and right is half that side, the link you posted mentions that, I am actually surprised you never accidentally discovered either. I have that in KDE as well.
Also, double-clicking on a top or a bottom edge will v-maximize window, or resizing a window vertically and overshooting at the top or at the bottom of the screen.
Thanks for giving me a name for this that I can search for to turn it off. There’s nothing more annoying in my day than when I drag a window from one monitor to the other, then the windows cuts it in half and sticks it to the side of my screen.
I never knew what windows called it before, so there was no way to get rid of it in settings.
> I never knew what windows called it before, so there was no way to get rid of it in settings.
The settings pages aren't that big. You could read through it all in 5 minutes. Did you look? I mean sometimes things are annoying and you just can't be bothered to dig around to find the thing that turns it off, but at least in this case, it's easy:
Out of curiosity, I just opened Windows 10 Settings. I see sixteen top level options. I opened the first one and it had 16 submenus, the first of which is two pages tall and has 8 additional settings links from it. Of course, Control Panel is also a place it could be hiding, and it's even bigger.
So, no. One does not simply click on every single thing in settings hoping to find the annoying thing that Windows is doing today that you don't have a name for.
Typing "Snap Window" into search narrows it down to three, which makes it possible to accomplish.
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.
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:
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.
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.
What is typographic around buttons, toolbars and other panes?
your eye needs somewhere to rest
There is a big difference between newspaper columns and web whitespace. The former are more or less uniform and easily seen (I’ve also read newspapers with explicit delineation of separate articles, and it was even better experience). The latter is just chaotic blobs of whitespace, which doesn’t usually even delineate or makes your eyes rest, it makes them lost instead. You can’t see structure, because it is so blobby. Whitespace should only surround the elements which are much more dense and “thicker” than it. Otherwise it will blend into them dissolving any structure.
> 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.
> I think that also has to do with "more white space = more scrolling = more ads".
When applied to the web, maybe, yes. But then there are desktop apps, and entire operating systems, designed this way.
I think it has something to do with the phones after all. Everything is "mobile first" these days (to a ridiculous degree — there's a large grocery delivery service in my city that is ONLY available through a mobile app, so they lost me as a customer), so designers have much more experience with touchscreen UIs. Desktop anything feels like an afterthought oftentimes. It's just easier to take a mobile UI, blow it up to a computer screen, or put it into a window, optionally add a dual-pane layout, and call it a day.
That, and the fact how many designers regard the result of their work as a thing in itself, an art piece to be admired, instead of merely a coat of paint on a tool that just helps people get their f-ing stuff done more efficiently and then gets out of the way.
Along with a tiny body font, the effect is to more or less force you to maximize the window to make the site usable -- i.e. commandeer your desktop. Squarespace was an "innovator" in this technique.
But... that's the opposite of what was asked for. Adding an extension adds more of the bad. A patch for Firefox reader mode would be better in my opinion since the web itself won't become better.
Any more details on that registry hack? I have been using RetroBar to have clear borders on taskbar and nostalgia. It doesn't have all actual features of windows 10 taskbar though.
Half of cutting the images is a space saving thing.
Wikipedia is a pretty big website, and (like the rest of my web presence) I'm hosting the mirror on a single small consumer hardware server. I'm keeping all the wikipedia pages as compressed HTML, and if you look at the sources you'll see it's very bare bones, most pages are like 50 Kb, yet the total is still 21 Gb. I don't think I have the space or bandwidth for selfhosting all of wikipedia's images.
Part of this experiment is to illustrate just how ridiculously large page loads on a lot of pages. Even text-heavy ones like Wikipedia.
If you compare the HTML payload alone of these two renditions of largely the same text, it's a 50x difference. The full Wikipedia page load exceeds 1 Mb, mine isn't even 10 Kb.
Would probably lose more than you'd gain doing that. The HTML right now is so clean you can read it without a browser, almost looks like it might be hand written, while still preserving things like formulas and tables (which do need a browser).
I'm with you on links being distracting, but it seems you... nuked them entirely, which maybe goes too far haha? I guess you can always go back to source if you want that.
In part this is because I feel inline links on wikipedia often lets you overestimate how well you comprehend a subject. It's as though the fact that there is a link over a word makes you think you could go check what that is, and therefore that you probably understand the word.
Actually looking up some term mid sentence is also probably not particularly helpful for understanding the text either.
I concede that this is a somewhat unusual decision, but I designed the pages for the singular purpose of reading and comprehending the article. Everything else is secondary. It's a bit of a design experiment, but I think it's worked out pretty well. I don't fall into skim-reading these articles like I must admit I often do with regular Wikipedia articles.
Oh, ha, I didn't even notice that. Ok, I like that!
I was actually looking at the footnote links, and those do indeed seem to be missing entirely -- as well as the whole references section. Arguably that's more important than links to "definition" wiki pages, so it forms the basis for the knowledge (vs mostly just definitions).
Yeah, I removed those entirely, as I very rarely use those. More often than not the links are pay walled and the references are books that may or may not even be in print. Maybe it's useful if you have a university library at hand but I don't so I simply live with the fact that some of the things I've read may be wrong.
If you want to look up sources it's better to use the live wikipedia at any rate, since it will be more up to date than this snapshot.
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. I'm self hosting so there's no real money cost besides the one-time investment in hardware. A really chap person could probably host this off a raspberry pi attached to something like a Corsair Voyager and serve multiple requests per second.
There's some technical trickiness in actually storing the files in a file system, since most filesystems don't deal well with having millions of files in the same folder. So I've had to build a four-tier directory structure based on the hash of the file name to be able to store the files. They're stored in a structure like 31/444/781/225/foobar.gz.
I did some experiments storing them as BLOBs in a database, but I couldn't get it to work.
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.
That is very nice looking. But I want the hyperlinks because the information I want is often spread out over more than one page (often Wikipedia achieves more concision than a traditional encyclopedia by hyperlinking rather than defining the terms it uses). And I want references because otherwise the information is unreliable. And I often want images because they sometimes convey information better than any text ("an image is worth a thousand words").
Regular wikipedia is still there if those are your preferences. I don't know, I've never check a single reference in over a decade of using Wikipedia. I don't have access to those references. Maybe you do, if so that's cool.
This. What's with the fixed floating headers? Like my screen real estate isn't scarce enough? And even if not, I don't like sites treating my desktop like a phone but blown up really big.
not totally obvious to me what you mean here? at first glance this seems to have less chrome than the standard ui, and to be more timeless in the specific sense that it has a closer resemblance to a paper encyclopedia layout versus mid-00s web styling.
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)
I've just looked into this, it seems Chrome displays that because of the "tabs" permission:
> "Technically this permission allows observing the history via chrome.tabs.onUpdated, but not read the previously existing history, so the phrasing is not entirely correct, strictly speaking."
To be clear, the extension doesn't access your browsing history at all. The "tabs" permission is just used to find Wikipedia tabs and enable/disable the new design when using the toggle from the browser popup.
The permissions requested (in the manifest.json file) are:
Note that you could also make it a bookmarklet which requires no permissions and only accesses the current tab when the user clicks it. Would be nice for trying out how it looks, given how little it changes I was expecting this would be a little bookmarklet and was a bit disappointed I had to add an extension to my browser for trying the look.
A bookmarklet would have to be clicked every time you open a new wikipedia page. I think it would be more productive to just fix the main permission issue (can view entire browsing history - author says in a comment they'll be fixing it). Chrome also lets you keep the extension inactive - you can easily activate it on-demand from the toolbar. If you do that on a minimal-permission extension, you have the equivalent of a bookmarklet.
FYI for any other extensions that do this, you can use the extension permissions to disallow them from running everywhere, and just give access to the site(s) where you want them to run. This doesn't require the devs to have done anything special — this functionality is built into Chrome. Weirdly, this is only available in Chromium browsers, not Firefox, at least last I checked.
The design is interesting, but I can't help wonder why the design insists on keeping a specific page width instead of using the whole browser window. Even worse, for really wide pages, it just shows a column in the middle.
In my case this is an annoying fix because then I have to resize the browser window all the time. As well as the default window manager on Windows not having features to center a window or shrinking/expanding window size to fit the desired max line width.
I also find the desktop behind the browser window distracting.
Having said that; Reader mode solves most of the above issues.
There's a point where long line lengths start negatively impacting reading speed, so a lot of designers incorporate that idea as a hard limit in their layouts.
It might be better to leave it up to users, because it's a very common complaint on many sites where text width is limited.
Another reminder that you can get the "mobile" version for Wikipedia on desktop. Just add ”?useskin=minerva" (sans double quotes) to the end of the URL. Since my browser can't have extensions, I did a dirty userscript for doing that with JavaScript.
Conversely, the old desktop skin has been updated to work well on mobile. I really like how they carried the "pixel art" icon aesthetic over to retina displays. (When you zoom in, you'll see that they're actually vectors with smooth gradients.) And when you turn your phone to landscape, the familiar desktop interface comes back.
I absolutely adore the positioning of the table of contents. The design looks clean, utilitarian, and overall well executed.
That being said - and this is more a critique of modern design - I absolutely hate the suffocating roundness of the element corners. It's an aesthetic that drips with overfamiliarity and a patronizing attitude. It's the visual equivalent of being put in a padded room, or having a distant relative who you have nothing in common with and have not seen in years trying to relate to you with anecdotes about your childhood that you can scarcely remember.
As a person who designs web applications to look somewhat modern because that's what is now-days expected, whenever critics go to such extreme similes about modern web design and their hatred for it... it's such an extreme opinion I tune them out entirely. You can't cater to radicals.
Most people don't particularly care how things look, so long as they're reasonably familiar, well-ordered, visually inoffensive, and functional. After that, it's optimizing for performance metrics and ensuring that the client is happy with the aesthetic of the final product.
Client usually wants to emulate some elements of the latest aesthetic trend. Can't blame designers for what's ultimately a fashion trend. Especially when breaking from the trends and convention put you at risk of looking dated or driving away consumers.
It's more that, I've read critics of modern web design. And while I can understand that some people don't like it (myself included for some things), the visceral hatred that some people have in their rants against it is so great, I can't possibly send that to a client with a straight face. It's so extreme it's absolutely useless.
Edit: At some point, while you can agree with some of the critics' points, they become completely out-of-touch with reality and the typical user.
That's, uh, a pretty intense reaction to some curves.
There is a long history of rounded corners in graphic design. In the real world, perfectly sharp edges do not exist. Even on the printed page, ink bleed tends to gently round all corners.
This is a good thing, because sharp corners interact poorly with some parts of our visual system. Sharp corners in a design can be as jarring as extremely high contrast or saturated colors, which are also best avoided in designs where the intent is to let the viewer focus on the content and not the form.
A slight amount of corner rounding in digital graphic design can lead to a look that is easier on the eyes, less distracting, and more approachable. (The design here uses more rounding than necessary, but I think it's driven largely by fashion and the above principles and not some dystopian desire to infantilize you.)
I'm absolutely an advocate for corners that are rounded to a reasonable degree. As you stated, perfectly sharp corners can produce a harsh, inorganic aesthetic that can be distracting to users.
Even very round corners can be contextually appropriate.
There's a world of difference between a few pixels of roundness, and making your entire website look like a fisher-price toy.
Round, organic designs can be complex and visually pleasing. They take a lot of work to execute well, and are rarely confined to the simple rectangles that dominate modern interface design.
The large border radius on modern UIs doesn't contribute anything interesting to previous UX other than the novelty of round corners. It hasn't been motivated, or motivated any meaningful new design approaches. All it's accomplished is that it's turned UI elements into rectangular pills that function almost exactly as they did before.
I see it as an aesthetic reflection of the modern technologist's attitude towards their user-bases.
The table of content is the bit I like the least. The observation is correct, then entire left hand sidebar of the standard Wikipedia layout isn't actually that useful. Putting the table of content in the sidebar might be an idea, but why the big bulk font? Just take the normal TOC and move it to the sidebar.
One big thing many could learn from, from the standard Wikipedia, and where this "modern" alternative fails, is the use of icons. Wikipedia mainly use text labels, not icons, which mean that I don't have to guess what the three dots mean. When going to Wikipedia, it very clearly states that I am in fact "Not logged in", this modern UI just have the person icon, but am I logged in? Similarly there's a small clock with an arrow, if I don't understand that Wikipedia is versioned, I have no idea what that does. The "view history" is much more clear, even if "View page history" would be even better.
It's pretty fun to play around with alternative designs for pages like Wikipedia, but actual updates should be done because it improved usability, not because it fails to follow trends that will change in a few years anyway.
I don't know why but since at least a year we have a new design on the french version of wikipedia (you can check by yourself on any wikipedia page in french).
But the english UI is bad it's hard to read on large screen. With your extension is really nice.
Same here, we're fortunate it hasn't gone down the road of typical webdev anti-patterns. (at least besides the donation banners, which is understandable ;) )
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 but there should at least be redirects to the correct subdomains.
> its really annoying to click on a Wikipedia link on HN/Reddit and having it open the mobile site on desktop.
Yes, this is a gigantic pain. But I would say that it's the HN commenters being incredibly obnoxious, not wikipedia being wrong for giving you the mobile site when you specifically ask for it.
> But I would say that it's the HN commenters being incredibly obnoxious, not wikipedia being wrong for giving you the mobile site when you specifically ask for it.
But it's kinda crazy that if I'm on my phone I can't just share a URL to a page with someone who happens to be using a desktop. While I'm not sure if this is made explicit in any of the RFCs or standard docs, in my view a URL should be a locator for a resource that is agnostic of the user agent.
> But it's kinda crazy that if I'm on my phone I can't just share a URL to a page with someone who happens to be using a desktop.
> in my view a URL should be a locator for a resource that is agnostic of the user agent.
You're not making sense. The mobile page has a dedicated URL. If you're browsing it, then sharing the URL will send anyone else to the same resource you're browsing, regardless of their user agent. Everyone agrees that this is a bad thing for you to do. Don't do it.
The standard page will redirect mobile user-agents to the mobile page. It is a better URL to give out in every possible way. But note that this is the opposite of what you're saying; the URL that behaves the way you say you want is the bad one that you should avoid sharing.
I am sympathetic to the view that the URL should just point wherever it points. This would require a change to Wikipedia's standard page so that it would display when requested on mobile instead of redirecting. That's fine. But sharing mobile links would still be awful behavior. Link to the standard page. That's what makes it the standard page.
You're mistaken. Wikipedia automatically redirects you to the m. website if you type "en.wikipedia.org" into your phone browser. The same is true even if you explicitly type an article's URL into your phone browser, like "en.wikipedia.org/London". Google and Bing will also show mobile URLs in search results (although DuckDuckGo does not). The only way to see the actual desktop version is to click on the "Desktop" link at the very bottom of a mobile page, and even that just sets a cookie to prevent redirection back to the mobile site, so it doesn't work across multiple devices or private browsing sessions.
> You're mistaken. Wikipedia automatically redirects you to the m. website if you type "en.wikipedia.org" into your phone browser. The same is true even if you explicitly type an article's URL into your phone browser, like "en.wikipedia.org/London".
What am I mistaken about? This is exactly what I said happens. I focused this information pretty heavily:
>> The standard page will redirect mobile user-agents to the mobile page.
>> I am sympathetic to the view that the URL should just point wherever it points. This would require a change to Wikipedia's standard page so that it would display when requested on mobile instead of redirecting.
You're mistaken that being on the "m." subdomain indicates that you have made some decision to do so, and that sharing that URL ought to send anyone to the mobile design. On the contrary, the entire point of a URL is for sharing a resource, and if a URL to a public resources is not shareable that is a mistake on the part of the web site, not a mistake on the part of the visitor. It's certainly not the case that "Everyone agrees that this is a bad thing for you to do." It's not a bad thing for you to do, it is precisely what you ought to do. As I explained elsewhere on the thread, one could just as easily argue that sharing the "desktop" URL is also inappropriate, because some people might want to see the "mobile" design even if they're on a desktop computer (because the "mobile" design is in fact responsive).
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.* which it seems that everyone agrees shouldn't be the behavior. The opposite, m.* redirecting people on desktop, doesn't occur.
That means that your statement that "URLs should be for a specific resource" contradicts your other statement that "sharing that URL ought [not] to send anyone to the mobile design". If the mobile page is a separate resource, then sending someone a link to m.* should always load that resource (the mobile version) which seems to the be the opposite of what you're suggesting.
Additionally, there seems to be additional confusion because everyone is assuming that the page loaded at m.* is the same page as that loaded on en.* but that doesn't seem to be the case as the page isn't responsive. It's the same text content but the stylesheet and headers are different which, by web standards, is a separate resource.
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 to always see the mobile design even when they are on a desktop computer. I think it's outlandish to say that mobile users should never share the URLs they are viewing simply because some (but not all!) desktop users might prefer the desktop design.
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).
I agree with criticism of Wikipedia’s behavior. I disagree that ordinary visitors to the website should need to or indeed should manually manipulate the URL of the page they’re on in order to share it with someone else. If you’re sharing the URL directly with a specific person who you know feels strongly about which URL they received, then sure, do it to be nice. But I disagree with prescribing that one URL should be the default (when it’s not even clear which one it should be!) and complaining about other people not respecting your preferred default URL.
> I disagree that ordinary visitors to the website should need to or indeed should manually manipulate the URL of the page they’re on in order to share it with someone else.
Everyone agrees with you on this point. You shouldn't need to manually manipulate anything but, because Wikipedia keeps a desktop resource and a mobile resource, there is a distinction and so you do need to manually manipulate it if you're sending a link from mobile to someone else and don't know their device. That doesn't change the fact that sending a mobile URL should always show the mobile page because that is, in fact, a unique resource and, therefore, has a unique URL.
> because Wikipedia keeps a desktop resource and a mobile resource, there is a distinction and so you do need to manually manipulate it if you're sending a link from mobile to someone else and don't know their device.
As I've explained, even knowing their device is not sufficient, because someone on a desktop device may prefer the "mobile" design (which is responsive) or someone on a mobile device may prefer the desktop design (because it apparently contains more features). And if you're sharing the link with multiple people or publicly, you obviously can't accommodate mutually exclusive preferences.
That wasn't my point, though. My point is that the mobile version and the desktop version are explicitly different resources. They do not load the same page. Therefore, they should have separate URLs. The very first parent comment stated that sending the "m." URL should load the mobile version of the page regardless of the device being used and they're correct. The fact that people are redirected there from the main URL is the problem, not the fact that they're sending the link to the mobile version since that's the "correct" behavior according to URL standards.
en.m. is NOT a seperate resource from en.. It is the SAME resource because it has the SAME content and because editing the content on EITHER changes the content on the other. It is a different PRESENTATION of the content, which should be served at the same URL. This is WHY HTTP has such headers as Vary and Accept.
If en.m. is asking for the mobile version, then en. is asking for the desktop version, yes? So why does en. redirect to en.m. on mobile?
Okay, and? Again, they both display the same content, and edits made to either one affect the other. I don't know why you think it's relevant that there are (supposedly) "functional differences", sockpuppet.
Sockpuppet? And who exactly would I be sockpuppeting for? Big Wiki?
It's relevant that there are functional differences because those are not presentational differences. HTML is for content, CSS is for presentation. If the HTML is different, then it's a different resource and, therefore, gets a different resource locator (URL).
The use case is: I go to the standard wikipedia page, browse a bit, and then I want to give out links to the standard wikipedia page of a specifig article.
This is currently not possible without editing the URL if you are on mobile. And I dont understand why wikipedia is refusing to fix this.
Correct, and my claim is that there should be no such concept as "giving out a link to the standard Wikipedia page." Regardless of what type of device I'm using, I should be able to share the URL for that page to someone else regardless of what type of device they're using. The URL should literally be the uniform locator of that resource and shouldn't contain any semantics about any particular user agent's device.
This is pretty obvious in the general case, where it would be impossible for me to know if the URL I am visiting contains information about my particular user agent and is thus inappropriate to share with people with other user agents. When my user agent requests "en.wikipedia.org" and receives a redirect to "en.m.wikipedia.org" there's simply no way to know whether this resource has actually moved to a new URL (which is the semantics of the HTTP response) or whether this is simply a special URL that I shouldn't share. Yes, some people might be familiar with the "m." subdomain for mobile-specific websites, but in general this sort of thing is (in my opinion) an abuse of HTTP redirects.
> Regardless of what type of device I'm using, I should be able to share the URL for that page to someone else regardless of what type of device they're using. The URL should literally be the uniform locator of that resource and shouldn't contain any semantics about any particular user agent's device.
As I just pointed out, and you somehow misunderstood, this is the exact behavior of the mobile page. It is not the behavior of the standard page. But sharing a link to the mobile page is bad, and sharing a link to the standard page is good. Keep this in mind when you're deciding how URLs should behave.
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 able to share that URL with anyone using any user agent. If I cannot do that, that is the responsibility of the web site administrators.
> 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, no matter what device you're using, no matter what device they're using.
This is the problem. The behavior you are looking for, of different people seeing different content according to their user-agent, is also provided, and it's provided by the standard page.
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."
> Again, the point is that the non-mobile URL redirects to the mobile URL.
And I would argue that this is not only the point but the problem we are talking about. It makes the m. pages appear all over the Internet although they are less suitable for some devices (they are, I'd argue, even less usable because, e.g., the page history is missing when you are not logged in).
I always remove the m. from Wikipedia links when I share them somewhere that people can browse from the desktop (example HN). People tapping on that link on a phone will be redirected to the mobile version anyway. I don't remove the m. when I share on a messenger (example WhatsApp) when is somebody could receive the message on a desktop. I should probably always remove the m.
It's kinda strange that you think someone who is on a phone copying a link and sharing it with someone who is not on a phone, is the latter person "specifically ask[ing]" for the mobile page.
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.
Yes. "Always the same no matter what" is what was described. If your friend is looking at a mobile wikipedia page, and sends you the URL for that page, then you too will see the same mobile wikipedia page when you follow the link. That's the whole concept of being "the same".
No, what was described was specifically "the same Wikipedia page their friend saw, adapted to their screen". "The same Wikipedia page their friend saw" meaning the same contents - the same rendered Wikitext - they don't care about getting the same experience, they want the same data. "adapted to their screen" meaning NOT seeing the mobile experience on a desktop!
I can only assume you are trolling because you are assuming a meaning that is the complete antithesis of what namdnay explicitly said (and what everyone else in this dead thread has been telling you). Therefore I will go ahead and say farewell and good luck.
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!
No one is asking for en.m.wikipedia.org. Someone on their phone asks for en.wikipedia.org (or more likely clicks a link to it from Google or elsewhere), gets redirected to en.m.wikipedia.org (instead of serving a mobile or responsive page directly on en.wikipedia.org), and then copies the resulting link to their friend who didn't ask for any of this. And worse yet, in most cases neither party even notices the `.m.` much less knows what it means or to remove it to get a "normal" Wikipedia.
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people typing `en.m.wikipedia.org` in. I'm pretty sure the number of people doing that is negligible, in fact.
And by the way, I wouldn't care about the existence of en.m.wikipedia.org nearly as much if it actually were opt-in. Because then it would be a lot more rare. The problem is that Wikipedia opts you into it implicitly if you are on mobile. Which means that if anyone in a chain of clicking on and then sharing a link is on mobile... suddenly everyone sees the mobile link and needs to do much more work than "click on a link" to opt OUT of it.
Well over 50% of the Wikipedia links I see these days are mobile links and 0% of the time am I clicking on them from a mobile device.
However, that link is totally in the wrong place, no wonder I could not find it. I just assumed there was no such link/button and always angrily removed the 'm.' from each URL.
Equally, I don't like it when websites try to guess what kind of browser I'm in and force me into the mobile experience when I have a window take up half the screen on a 1080p monitor, ... so I guess there's really no easy win for this :(
When I pin a browser to the left or right side of one of my monitors, these sites will often go into mobile mode despite the fact that the browser is still wide enough that desktop mode works fine, merely because the window is now taller than it is wide. And I find that incredibly annoying.
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 cramming 1080 or 1440 or whatever amount of physical screen pixels into its display width should still come in at something like 300 to 400ish CSS pixels. Or am I misunderstanding something?
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.
You're goning to need <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> 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).
> (but still inconsitently scale the font sizes so you have to zoom in and out to read different parts)
Once you start with the hack of giving non-mobile-compatible pages a larger viewport in order to not break layouts that react allergic when being squeezed into 300-something pixels, what else do you want to do?
Not scaling font sizes at all just gives you either tiny text (if you zoom out to fit the large viewport onto the small mobile screen) or loads of scrolling around if you display the page at 100 % zoom level instead.
And scaling up all text means you end up approximatively just where you started before you started resizing the viewport. It might not be absolutely exactly the same layout breakage as when squeezing an old page directly into the 300 or so pixels available on a mobile phone in portrait mode, but it will be pretty similar.
So that only leaves trying to scale up only the main body of text (which normally isn't that sensitive with regards to scaling up the font size and therefore increasing its size requirements) and leaving alone smaller bits of text like menus, the page navigation etc., which are more likely to be size-constrained and start causing layout breakage if increased by an extraordinary amount.
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!
Right! If you've got a window that narrow, the only way the design will even work or layout correctly is with the "mobile" layout...
The bigger problem is people hiding functionality if you're in the mobile breakpoint. That's an issue: all functionality should be enabled, at least in some way IMO. Mobile should never be a second class citizen :)
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.
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 capital-H hard.
The implementations for these have some... complications, the device sets we now deal with are huge, and making sure there are no idiosyncratic bugs that creep up when using them is legitimately a fair bit of work.
> 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 would say that half of my monitor, more accurately, is about the dimensions of an iPad at comfortable viewing distance.
Phones are far taller than half of a 1080p screen.
Half a monitor is: 960 x 1080, or 1:1.125
A iPhone is: 828 x 1792, or 1:2.164
So websites tend to shove a candybar shape into a nearly square sheet of paper and waste a lot of usable proportions for things like controls or hamburger menus.
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.
The worst part is that the other points you could use: DPI, resolution, touch capability... all of this exists on certain laptops now!
But, at least as far as I approach media queries, if you've triggered the mobile breakpoint (well, default CSS as mobile-first is the way we approach it), its because the desktop design we've used literally will break on a browser window that narrow.
I also get annoyed when I get bumped to the "mobile" "experience" even when I'm on a smartphone. With reactive design, "request desktop site" generally doesn't work, either.
I really, REALLY prefer desktop mode for almost everything, relying on pinch to zoom.
> With reactive design, "request desktop site" generally doesn't work, either.
It shouldn't, because with proper reactive design therre are no "mobile" and "desktop" versions but only one version that adapts to the viewport size. If you want a larger viewport that should be solved at the browser level by providing the website with a larger viewport. Seems firefox behaves this way while chrome does something weird that increases the viewport a bit but then still "intelligently" scales some text.
Well what if you don’t WANT the interface to change between viewports? We used to use Desktop-style interfaces on 1024x768 displays, or even 640x480. Now we just get a one-dimensional mobile interface when the viewport is smaller than whatever arbitrary threshold is fashionable among designers. It’s incredibly annoying to have interfaces become downgraded (ie hyper-simplified) regardless of what the user requests just because they haven’t kept up with the resolution upgrade treadmill. Pinch and zoom (in BOTH directions) is such a powerful UI tool from the user’s perspective but its usefulness has become completely neutered by insistence on “reactive” design ripping control away from the user.
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.
Install Firefox Redirector: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
Add a rule to redirect (https?://)?(\w+\.)m\.wikipedia.org(.*) to $1$2wikipedia.org$3
Then you never have to deal with mobile Wikipedia on desktop again. You can use this for other sites too, like forcing all uses of Reddit to always open in old.reddit.com.
Just as a sidenote on the Reddit point, you can force old Reddit from your settings after you log in. That setting seems to stick even if you log out/your session times out, and you can go back to new Reddit with new.reddit.com.
> 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 expire or what, but I often end up clicking on Wikipedia links and getting the awful "desktop" design.
All of this is just to say that, yes, they shouldn't use separate "m." URLs, but it's just as wrong to get upset at mobile users sharing "m." URLs as it is to get upset at desktop users sharing URLs without the "m." Arguably if you expect all users to always share the most versatile URL, you should expect them to always share the "m." URL since it has a responsive design.
I might be ok with "the mobile reactive version everywhere" if it didn't also lack a bunch of features. Not being able to easily get to the talk page to contextualize what you're reading makes the mobile site very frustrating.
If it pinned the headings/outline to the left side of the article (like the extension showcased does) it'd be that much better for a responsive design on Desktop.
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.
semi-OT but Twitter seems to have recently started putting "mobile.twitter.com" in my URL bar (on mobile), as well as adding a UUID in a "t" query param when you use their "copy link" flow, which is all annoying cruft to have to delete when sharing links.
They used to just put "?s=19" through "?s=22" or so, which enumerated clients (desktop, mobile, Android, etc), which was better than the junk most other services stuff in (like utm_source and friends...)
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 redirect from m to www when appropriate.
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.
I got annoyed at this enough to write this tiny userscript:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Redirect from mobile wiki to desktop
// @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version 0.1
// @description try to take over the world!
// @author You
// @match https://*.m.wikipedia.org/*
// @grant none
// @run-at document-start
// ==/UserScript==
window.location.hostname=window.location.hostname.split(".")[0]+".wikipedia.org";
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.
It is also pretty fundamentally broken on iPad, since whether it reports itself as a mobile or desktop device depends on the size of the browser window.
I love my mobile app as well (RIF), but do you know about old.reddit.com? Still works great with RES, I couldn't imagine Reddit on the desktop any other way
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 mountain of trash to wade through to get any decent content.
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.
I agree, and I have already left using reddit. What's the alternative to some random content consumption (like reddit)? Like hacker news but for non-technology topics.
I can suggest wiby.me 's random button to discover new sites with modern opinions.
+1 for Lemmy. The project still has quite a lot to improve on, but it is already really great!
I'd love to see the community/network grow and evolve :)
disclaimer: I run lemmy.pt and use the platform on a daily basis
They only show a few comments on certain pages, which deemphasizes discussion. I'm not aware of any other changes to new Reddit that would do that.
Although other changes might have made things better, like changing how default subreddits work (although this applies to new and old reddit).
With the exception of a few subreddits that have made explicit rule changes (either encouraging or discouraging memes), I haven't really noticed a significant long term trend in meme-posting within subreddits.
Yeah, I actually like the existing Wikipedia design, but I like what the author has done here - I see it more as a minor UI evolution, with some additional conveniences.
Agreed with most of this stuff, but search on / (and even ctrl-f on some websites!) is horrible because it overrides the browser's shortcuts. When I press / I expect the Firefox quick find bar to come up, complete with highlighting and markers in the scrollbar and ctrl-{shift}-g to move between results and esc to exit search. Not some half baked JS search implementation or an unrelated search like in this extension - it searches for wiki pages, not text within the current page.
Fortunately this is pretty simple to disable with Greasemonkey (also 's' on github, though the userscript doesn't seem to work on Gitlab...).
On another note given that Wikipedia's content is in the open, maybe this new UI could be hosted at another domain e.g. pickypedia.org or itchypedia.org or something else funny instead of being a Chrome plugin.
Chrome plugins add more unwelcome startup bloat to the web browser, and while they are super useful to fix the UI issues of commercial, copyrighted websites, Wikipedia can totally legally be replicated at another domain.
You'd still need the old wikipedia to edit any articles and you'd still need a browser extension to redirect regular wikipedia links to your favorite frontend.
Also just like with open source projects, just because you are allowed to fork does not mean that you should as you could end up hurting the original project by e.g. confusing users.
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
Seing as wikipedia still has a separate m. subdomain in $current_year instead of just one responsive page means any claims that they know what they are doing will need to be backed up by evidence.
I miss the Encarta encyclopedia content/design. I wish Wikipedia could get to that level of content quality. The multimedia and interactive articles were way ahead of its time and were only partially matched by some Flash-based interactive animations.
I saw this comment, and assumed I would agree with you, but the sample image that was presented to me on clicking the link to the post appealed to me in at least one major aspect, and that's the table of contents on the side of the content. I'm often having to scroll to the top to quickly visit a couple different sections when I'm looking for some specific knowledge, and being able to quickly navigate with less scrolling would be a welcome improvement in my eyes.
Wikipedia's style is almost perfect except for one thing that bugs me: the line width in desktop style is unlimited, meaning in a big window it can be hundreds of symbols long, which is pretty bad from the readability standpoint (https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability).
Yeah they have changed some other Wikis too (like Portuguese). I think this is up to each wiki's governance (afaik they are somewhat independent) to opt-in on the new design.
I'm not sure I like it. The better line width is really welcome, but I'm tad uneasy about the rest. And as far as I can recall, it doesn't have a dark theme (yet).
one of the worst things about the current WP GUI is that when you hover over a hyperlinked word with the expectation that your anxious yearning for the definition of that word be fulfilled you're often forced to click through to the actual page, because the popup lacks a concise enough representation of that word, because the definition could not be contained within that small a space, or, the definition of the word succeeds some initial ramblings about the origins of the word, or of its inventors, which does not lead to me understanding the word and makes my WP deep dives less pleasurable.
I believe those texts are specifically set either on Wikidata, or via the template "short description" at the start of the article. Only where those are missing should it fall back to the beginning of the article text.
Certainly NLP could help here. In particular, there are two sub-areas concerned with document summarization and text simplification (e.g. remove relative clauses, split long/complex sentences), respectively, that could be useful in this case.
Nothing is wrong with the existing wikipedia interface. In this case, in the course of making it 'modern', it was made worse (like most 'modern' things).
Please remember from design 101 that line and shape have meaning and can help the user understand the interface.
* It seems to constrain the width to something even smaller than usual (800px?). I have 6000px of horizontal real estate, and while it would be mad to let text run to that length, the optimum is not what a phone can do. (I've tried to find out what "native" width is here, but I'm getting full-width no-constraint layouts with Firefox (no plugin, not logged in), 800px with the plugin (Chrome, logged in) and something in between (Safari, logged in).
* It hides links I regularly use behind menus (to the discussion page and version history).
I guess 9x% of people never edit Wikipedia and it might make sense to cater to them. But, then again, I'm not sure if it's the best idea to actively hide the fact that they could contribute. I also don't see as much of a difference to the mobile layout that is planned to slowly become default on desktop as well.
Edit: I found the slider to adjust page width. That's thoughtful!
I like it! I'm not one of those people who fetishizes 90's to mid-00's design. Something like Hacker News has its charm but let's not pretend all sites from that era were usable. One thing that drives me mad in default Wikipedia is the line length. On a large monitor it makes text way less readable. Also having access to the table of contents on the side is way better than having to scroll back up.
I think I would prefer rhe current Vector theme (or maybe Monobook, but definitely not thr Fandom one), but it would be fairly great to have a dark mode.
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?
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!
425 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 367 ms ] threadI made this free browser extension that modernizes the Wikipedia design. I started making this for myself just because I wanted more of a "reader mode" like experience (narrower column, nicer fonts, dark mode etc). Then I got a bit carried away and implemented everything I could think of for a modern redesign of Wikipedia. Hope you like it!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesign...
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.
From: https://codeberg.org/orenom/Wikiless
[0]: https://codeberg.org/orenom/wikiless
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 building interfaces with visual cues, and we spent decades tuning our reflexes to them. Then some whim of fashion decided that hiding all those cues was "smoother", and I want to choke someone.
For anyone curious, MS has a useful summary of how this works here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/snap-your-window...
I never knew what windows called it before, so there was no way to get rid of it in settings.
The settings pages aren't that big. You could read through it all in 5 minutes. Did you look? I mean sometimes things are annoying and you just can't be bothered to dig around to find the thing that turns it off, but at least in this case, it's easy:
Settings > System > Multitasking > Snap windows
Out of curiosity, I just opened Windows 10 Settings. I see sixteen top level options. I opened the first one and it had 16 submenus, the first of which is two pages tall and has 8 additional settings links from it. Of course, Control Panel is also a place it could be hiding, and it's even bigger.
So, no. One does not simply click on every single thing in settings hoping to find the annoying thing that Windows is doing today that you don't have a name for.
Typing "Snap Window" into search narrows it down to three, which makes it possible to accomplish.
Thanks again to the GP for enabling that.
you don't have to read every last word... you are just trying to get a vague feel for what is in there.
takes 5 minutes, max.
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.
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...
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...
your eye needs somewhere to rest
There is a big difference between newspaper columns and web whitespace. The former are more or less uniform and easily seen (I’ve also read newspapers with explicit delineation of separate articles, and it was even better experience). The latter is just chaotic blobs of whitespace, which doesn’t usually even delineate or makes your eyes rest, it makes them lost instead. You can’t see structure, because it is so blobby. Whitespace should only surround the elements which are much more dense and “thicker” than it. Otherwise it will blend into them dissolving any structure.
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.
When applied to the web, maybe, yes. But then there are desktop apps, and entire operating systems, designed this way.
I think it has something to do with the phones after all. Everything is "mobile first" these days (to a ridiculous degree — there's a large grocery delivery service in my city that is ONLY available through a mobile app, so they lost me as a customer), so designers have much more experience with touchscreen UIs. Desktop anything feels like an afterthought oftentimes. It's just easier to take a mobile UI, blow it up to a computer screen, or put it into a window, optionally add a dual-pane layout, and call it a day.
That, and the fact how many designers regard the result of their work as a thing in itself, an art piece to be admired, instead of merely a coat of paint on a tool that just helps people get their f-ing stuff done more efficiently and then gets out of the way.
But... that's the opposite of what was asked for. Adding an extension adds more of the bad. A patch for Firefox reader mode would be better in my opinion since the web itself won't become better.
https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki-start.html
(I built this mostly for myself, because I find it incredibly difficult to read text that has hyperlinks and images in the text)
Have you considered images just take up full width?
Wikipedia is a pretty big website, and (like the rest of my web presence) I'm hosting the mirror on a single small consumer hardware server. I'm keeping all the wikipedia pages as compressed HTML, and if you look at the sources you'll see it's very bare bones, most pages are like 50 Kb, yet the total is still 21 Gb. I don't think I have the space or bandwidth for selfhosting all of wikipedia's images.
Part of this experiment is to illustrate just how ridiculously large page loads on a lot of pages. Even text-heavy ones like Wikipedia.
If you compare the HTML payload alone of these two renditions of largely the same text, it's a 50x difference. The full Wikipedia page load exceeds 1 Mb, mine isn't even 10 Kb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scamander
https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Scamander
That's kinda ridiculous.
Have you attempted to convert them to plain text and serve those? Or is there no real savings there?
In part this is because I feel inline links on wikipedia often lets you overestimate how well you comprehend a subject. It's as though the fact that there is a link over a word makes you think you could go check what that is, and therefore that you probably understand the word.
Actually looking up some term mid sentence is also probably not particularly helpful for understanding the text either.
I concede that this is a somewhat unusual decision, but I designed the pages for the singular purpose of reading and comprehending the article. Everything else is secondary. It's a bit of a design experiment, but I think it's worked out pretty well. I don't fall into skim-reading these articles like I must admit I often do with regular Wikipedia articles.
I was actually looking at the footnote links, and those do indeed seem to be missing entirely -- as well as the whole references section. Arguably that's more important than links to "definition" wiki pages, so it forms the basis for the knowledge (vs mostly just definitions).
If you want to look up sources it's better to use the live wikipedia at any rate, since it will be more up to date than this snapshot.
My mirror clocks in at 21 Gb. I'm self hosting so there's no real money cost besides the one-time investment in hardware. A really chap person could probably host this off a raspberry pi attached to something like a Corsair Voyager and serve multiple requests per second.
There's some technical trickiness in actually storing the files in a file system, since most filesystems don't deal well with having millions of files in the same folder. So I've had to build a four-tier directory structure based on the hash of the file name to be able to store the files. They're stored in a structure like 31/444/781/225/foobar.gz.
I did some experiments storing them as BLOBs in a database, but I couldn't get it to work.
The bandwidth usage is pretty inconsequential since most of my pages clock in at just a few kilobytes.
To be honest, while this looks pretty, it’s really just Wikiwand 2.0.
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)
I always found it weird and annoying how the table of contents in Wikipedia is a tiny thing jammed at the start. It's so darn awkward to use.
> "Technically this permission allows observing the history via chrome.tabs.onUpdated, but not read the previously existing history, so the phrasing is not entirely correct, strictly speaking."
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64063754/chrome-extensio...
To be clear, the extension doesn't access your browsing history at all. The "tabs" permission is just used to find Wikipedia tabs and enable/disable the new design when using the toggle from the browser popup.
The permissions requested (in the manifest.json file) are:
I will change that to "activeTab" in the next update which should fix it.Having said that; Reader mode solves most of the above issues.
It might be better to leave it up to users, because it's a very common complaint on many sites where text width is limited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=monobook
I absolutely adore the positioning of the table of contents. The design looks clean, utilitarian, and overall well executed.
That being said - and this is more a critique of modern design - I absolutely hate the suffocating roundness of the element corners. It's an aesthetic that drips with overfamiliarity and a patronizing attitude. It's the visual equivalent of being put in a padded room, or having a distant relative who you have nothing in common with and have not seen in years trying to relate to you with anecdotes about your childhood that you can scarcely remember.
Client usually wants to emulate some elements of the latest aesthetic trend. Can't blame designers for what's ultimately a fashion trend. Especially when breaking from the trends and convention put you at risk of looking dated or driving away consumers.
Edit: some grammar
Edit: At some point, while you can agree with some of the critics' points, they become completely out-of-touch with reality and the typical user.
There is a long history of rounded corners in graphic design. In the real world, perfectly sharp edges do not exist. Even on the printed page, ink bleed tends to gently round all corners.
This is a good thing, because sharp corners interact poorly with some parts of our visual system. Sharp corners in a design can be as jarring as extremely high contrast or saturated colors, which are also best avoided in designs where the intent is to let the viewer focus on the content and not the form.
A slight amount of corner rounding in digital graphic design can lead to a look that is easier on the eyes, less distracting, and more approachable. (The design here uses more rounding than necessary, but I think it's driven largely by fashion and the above principles and not some dystopian desire to infantilize you.)
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_illusion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_inhibition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_glare
http://people.sunyit.edu/~lepres/thesis/principles/63_pdfsam...
http://macknik.neuralcorrelate.com/pdf/articles/troncoso_et_...
Even very round corners can be contextually appropriate.
There's a world of difference between a few pixels of roundness, and making your entire website look like a fisher-price toy.
Round, organic designs can be complex and visually pleasing. They take a lot of work to execute well, and are rarely confined to the simple rectangles that dominate modern interface design.
The large border radius on modern UIs doesn't contribute anything interesting to previous UX other than the novelty of round corners. It hasn't been motivated, or motivated any meaningful new design approaches. All it's accomplished is that it's turned UI elements into rectangular pills that function almost exactly as they did before.
I see it as an aesthetic reflection of the modern technologist's attitude towards their user-bases.
Edit:some grammar
Have you seen Android 12's new fisher-price UI? I would really love to hear your thoughts on this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xLgXIhebxA
One big thing many could learn from, from the standard Wikipedia, and where this "modern" alternative fails, is the use of icons. Wikipedia mainly use text labels, not icons, which mean that I don't have to guess what the three dots mean. When going to Wikipedia, it very clearly states that I am in fact "Not logged in", this modern UI just have the person icon, but am I logged in? Similarly there's a small clock with an arrow, if I don't understand that Wikipedia is versioned, I have no idea what that does. The "view history" is much more clear, even if "View page history" would be even better.
It's pretty fun to play around with alternative designs for pages like Wikipedia, but actual updates should be done because it improved usability, not because it fails to follow trends that will change in a few years anyway.
I don't know why but since at least a year we have a new design on the french version of wikipedia (you can check by yourself on any wikipedia page in french).
But the english UI is bad it's hard to read on large screen. With your extension is really nice.
edit: I do need to uncheck the "Use Legacy Vector" to have the new design. I don't know why, maybe it was a cache issue but now it works.
But i am sure there are people who will appreciate your effort. Thank you for your work.
edit: formatting
Yes, this is a gigantic pain. But I would say that it's the HN commenters being incredibly obnoxious, not wikipedia being wrong for giving you the mobile site when you specifically ask for it.
But it's kinda crazy that if I'm on my phone I can't just share a URL to a page with someone who happens to be using a desktop. While I'm not sure if this is made explicit in any of the RFCs or standard docs, in my view a URL should be a locator for a resource that is agnostic of the user agent.
> in my view a URL should be a locator for a resource that is agnostic of the user agent.
You're not making sense. The mobile page has a dedicated URL. If you're browsing it, then sharing the URL will send anyone else to the same resource you're browsing, regardless of their user agent. Everyone agrees that this is a bad thing for you to do. Don't do it.
The standard page will redirect mobile user-agents to the mobile page. It is a better URL to give out in every possible way. But note that this is the opposite of what you're saying; the URL that behaves the way you say you want is the bad one that you should avoid sharing.
I am sympathetic to the view that the URL should just point wherever it points. This would require a change to Wikipedia's standard page so that it would display when requested on mobile instead of redirecting. That's fine. But sharing mobile links would still be awful behavior. Link to the standard page. That's what makes it the standard page.
What am I mistaken about? This is exactly what I said happens. I focused this information pretty heavily:
>> The standard page will redirect mobile user-agents to the mobile page.
>> I am sympathetic to the view that the URL should just point wherever it points. This would require a change to Wikipedia's standard page so that it would display when requested on mobile instead of redirecting.
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.* which it seems that everyone agrees shouldn't be the behavior. The opposite, m.* redirecting people on desktop, doesn't occur.
That means that your statement that "URLs should be for a specific resource" contradicts your other statement that "sharing that URL ought [not] to send anyone to the mobile design". If the mobile page is a separate resource, then sending someone a link to m.* should always load that resource (the mobile version) which seems to the be the opposite of what you're suggesting.
Additionally, there seems to be additional confusion because everyone is assuming that the page loaded at m.* is the same page as that loaded on en.* but that doesn't seem to be the case as the page isn't responsive. It's the same text content but the stylesheet and headers are different which, by web standards, is a separate resource.
Everyone agrees with you on this point. You shouldn't need to manually manipulate anything but, because Wikipedia keeps a desktop resource and a mobile resource, there is a distinction and so you do need to manually manipulate it if you're sending a link from mobile to someone else and don't know their device. That doesn't change the fact that sending a mobile URL should always show the mobile page because that is, in fact, a unique resource and, therefore, has a unique URL.
As I've explained, even knowing their device is not sufficient, because someone on a desktop device may prefer the "mobile" design (which is responsive) or someone on a mobile device may prefer the desktop design (because it apparently contains more features). And if you're sharing the link with multiple people or publicly, you obviously can't accommodate mutually exclusive preferences.
If en.m. is asking for the mobile version, then en. is asking for the desktop version, yes? So why does en. redirect to en.m. on mobile?
It reflects the fact that standard pages existed before mobile pages did.
It's relevant that there are functional differences because those are not presentational differences. HTML is for content, CSS is for presentation. If the HTML is different, then it's a different resource and, therefore, gets a different resource locator (URL).
The use case is: I go to the standard wikipedia page, browse a bit, and then I want to give out links to the standard wikipedia page of a specifig article.
This is currently not possible without editing the URL if you are on mobile. And I dont understand why wikipedia is refusing to fix this.
This is pretty obvious in the general case, where it would be impossible for me to know if the URL I am visiting contains information about my particular user agent and is thus inappropriate to share with people with other user agents. When my user agent requests "en.wikipedia.org" and receives a redirect to "en.m.wikipedia.org" there's simply no way to know whether this resource has actually moved to a new URL (which is the semantics of the HTTP response) or whether this is simply a special URL that I shouldn't share. Yes, some people might be familiar with the "m." subdomain for mobile-specific websites, but in general this sort of thing is (in my opinion) an abuse of HTTP redirects.
As I just pointed out, and you somehow misunderstood, this is the exact behavior of the mobile page. It is not the behavior of the standard page. But sharing a link to the mobile page is bad, and sharing a link to the standard page is good. Keep this in mind when you're deciding how URLs should behave.
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, no matter what device you're using, no matter what device they're using.
This is the problem. The behavior you are looking for, of different people seeing different content according to their user-agent, is also provided, and it's provided by the standard page.
And I would argue that this is not only the point but the problem we are talking about. It makes the m. pages appear all over the Internet although they are less suitable for some devices (they are, I'd argue, even less usable because, e.g., the page history is missing when you are not logged in).
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.
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 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.
No, it's not. The behavior of the mobile pages is always mobile-optimized no matter what.
I can only assume you are trolling because you are assuming a meaning that is the complete antithesis of what namdnay explicitly said (and what everyone else in this dead thread has been telling you). Therefore I will go ahead and say farewell and good luck.
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!
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people typing `en.m.wikipedia.org` in. I'm pretty sure the number of people doing that is negligible, in fact.
And by the way, I wouldn't care about the existence of en.m.wikipedia.org nearly as much if it actually were opt-in. Because then it would be a lot more rare. The problem is that Wikipedia opts you into it implicitly if you are on mobile. Which means that if anyone in a chain of clicking on and then sharing a link is on mobile... suddenly everyone sees the mobile link and needs to do much more work than "click on a link" to opt OUT of it.
Well over 50% of the Wikipedia links I see these days are mobile links and 0% of the time am I clicking on them from a mobile device.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-mobile-w...
However, that link is totally in the wrong place, no wonder I could not find it. I just assumed there was no such link/button and always angrily removed the 'm.' from each URL.
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 cramming 1080 or 1440 or whatever amount of physical screen pixels into its display width should still come in at something like 300 to 400ish CSS pixels. Or am I misunderstanding something?
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.
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).
Once you start with the hack of giving non-mobile-compatible pages a larger viewport in order to not break layouts that react allergic when being squeezed into 300-something pixels, what else do you want to do?
Not scaling font sizes at all just gives you either tiny text (if you zoom out to fit the large viewport onto the small mobile screen) or loads of scrolling around if you display the page at 100 % zoom level instead.
And scaling up all text means you end up approximatively just where you started before you started resizing the viewport. It might not be absolutely exactly the same layout breakage as when squeezing an old page directly into the 300 or so pixels available on a mobile phone in portrait mode, but it will be pretty similar.
So that only leaves trying to scale up only the main body of text (which normally isn't that sensitive with regards to scaling up the font size and therefore increasing its size requirements) and leaving alone smaller bits of text like menus, the page navigation etc., which are more likely to be size-constrained and start causing layout breakage if increased by an extraordinary amount.
The bigger problem is people hiding functionality if you're in the mobile breakpoint. That's an issue: all functionality should be enabled, at least in some way IMO. Mobile should never be a second class citizen :)
I'm sure there are some devices it doesn't fit perfectly for though. This stuff is capital-H hard.
You mean quote-unquote Hard?
The implementations for these have some... complications, the device sets we now deal with are huge, and making sure there are no idiosyncratic bugs that creep up when using them is legitimately a fair bit of work.
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.
Do you sit as close to your monitor as you hold your phone?
Phones are far taller than half of a 1080p screen.
Half a monitor is: 960 x 1080, or 1:1.125 A iPhone is: 828 x 1792, or 1:2.164
So websites tend to shove a candybar shape into a nearly square sheet of paper and waste a lot of usable proportions for things like controls or hamburger menus.
But, at least as far as I approach media queries, if you've triggered the mobile breakpoint (well, default CSS as mobile-first is the way we approach it), its because the desktop design we've used literally will break on a browser window that narrow.
I really, REALLY prefer desktop mode for almost everything, relying on pinch to zoom.
It shouldn't, because with proper reactive design therre are no "mobile" and "desktop" versions but only one version that adapts to the viewport size. If you want a larger viewport that should be solved at the browser level by providing the website with a larger viewport. Seems firefox behaves this way while chrome does something weird that increases the viewport a bit but then still "intelligently" scales some text.
I agree that you should prefer flow and size-to-fit but that does not mean that break points are never the right tool.
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 expire or what, but I often end up clicking on Wikipedia links and getting the awful "desktop" design.
All of this is just to say that, yes, they shouldn't use separate "m." URLs, but it's just as wrong to get upset at mobile users sharing "m." URLs as it is to get upset at desktop users sharing URLs without the "m." Arguably if you expect all users to always share the most versatile URL, you should expect them to always share the "m." URL since it has a responsive design.
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.
They used to just put "?s=19" through "?s=22" or so, which enumerated clients (desktop, mobile, Android, etc), which was better than the junk most other services stuff in (like utm_source and friends...)
You may find humour in the comically small "desktop" link at the very end of the page, next to the privacy policy.
On a phone, the mobile Wikipedia is perfect tho.
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.
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.
If "new" were to become the only way to access Reddit, I would probably abandon it.
That might have been their goal?
Although I detest having to use apps for every site. The Reddit app is also super buggy.
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 mountain of trash to wade through to get any decent content.
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.
I can suggest wiby.me 's random button to discover new sites with modern opinions.
[1] https://join-lemmy.org/
disclaimer: I run lemmy.pt and use the platform on a daily basis
Although other changes might have made things better, like changing how default subreddits work (although this applies to new and old reddit).
With the exception of a few subreddits that have made explicit rule changes (either encouraging or discouraging memes), I haven't really noticed a significant long term trend in meme-posting within subreddits.
On mobile you seem to need to do old.reddit.com every time.
Never installed the app on mobile.
The chasing left side TOC is really useful. The typography is slightly fancy without trying to be in your face.
The search (kbd /) is nice too.
I'd motivate the author to experiment with more stuff around accessing categories and hyperlinks in the page.
I like it!
Fortunately this is pretty simple to disable with Greasemonkey (also 's' on github, though the userscript doesn't seem to work on Gitlab...).
Chrome plugins add more unwelcome startup bloat to the web browser, and while they are super useful to fix the UI issues of commercial, copyrighted websites, Wikipedia can totally legally be replicated at another domain.
Also just like with open source projects, just because you are allowed to fork does not mean that you should as you could end up hurting the original project by e.g. confusing users.
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 ?
Actually, I'm wrong. It looks like they FINALLY added it less than a week ago.
Took them long enough.
I miss the Encarta encyclopedia content/design. I wish Wikipedia could get to that level of content quality. The multimedia and interactive articles were way ahead of its time and were only partially matched by some Flash-based interactive animations.
I'm not sure I like it. The better line width is really welcome, but I'm tad uneasy about the rest. And as far as I can recall, it doesn't have a dark theme (yet).
You don't need 20MB React bundles to make a good-looking website, and OP proves that perfectly
I want WP to solve this with NLP.
I guess *everything* is subject to corruption
Also, why is bandwidth costing them over a million dollars a year? Is it because of edge locations or something?
Please remember from design 101 that line and shape have meaning and can help the user understand the interface.
* It seems to constrain the width to something even smaller than usual (800px?). I have 6000px of horizontal real estate, and while it would be mad to let text run to that length, the optimum is not what a phone can do. (I've tried to find out what "native" width is here, but I'm getting full-width no-constraint layouts with Firefox (no plugin, not logged in), 800px with the plugin (Chrome, logged in) and something in between (Safari, logged in).
* It hides links I regularly use behind menus (to the discussion page and version history).
I guess 9x% of people never edit Wikipedia and it might make sense to cater to them. But, then again, I'm not sure if it's the best idea to actively hide the fact that they could contribute. I also don't see as much of a difference to the mobile layout that is planned to slowly become default on desktop as well.
Edit: I found the slider to adjust page width. That's thoughtful!
I think I would prefer rhe current Vector theme (or maybe Monobook, but definitely not thr Fandom one), but it would be fairly great to have a dark mode.
Thank you for your work!
[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:How_to_make_a_MediaWik...
sjdz, the work you have done putting this layout together is awesome!