Hey Kaldari,
Thanks so much for yesterday's code fix to display videos in a modal viewer when you
click on article thumbnails!
This was long overdue and makes a huge difference already, as shown in this example:
I agree with Erik that the ideal behavior would be to play the video immediately after you
click on the thumbnail, without requiring a second click to play in modal view.
Now, is there any chance we could do something similar for still photos? As a longtime
photographer, it drives me nuts that clicking on a thumbnail article takes you to this
overwhelming page on Commons, with scary walls of text all around the image. (That's
one of the reasons I haven't yet migrated any of my 20k Flickr photos to Commons,
BTW.)
Most modern web sites nowadays just show you the photo in full screen, with only a few
icons around it, so you can experience the image as it was intended to be seen (typically
in a black modal panel, to make it pop up more). You still have the option to reveal all
the text details if you want them, but they are not forced on you as we do today on
Wikipedia and Commons.
Hopefully, our new multimedia team will be able to join forces with the design team to
tackle some of these commonsense UI improvements, once we get up to speed this summer.
Thanks again for this welcome prelude :)
Fabrice
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Editor Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles
Date: May 29, 2013 9:21:48 PM PDT
To: Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>
Cc: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Yes, better support for display of images through a modal viewer would
be great. I'm not sure a "modal" parameter that has to be explicitly
set for files is the best approach - I would recommend optimizing the
default experience when a user clicks an image or video. It's not
clear that the current behavior based on a pixel threshold is actually
desirable as the default behavior. (On a side note, the TMH behavior
should be improved to actually play the video immediately, not require
a second click to play in modal view.)
Magnus Manske explored an alternative approach pretty extensively in
response to the October 2011 Coding Challenge, which is worth taking a
look at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/wikipic
Cheers,
Erik
From: Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles
Date: May 30, 2013 12:42:00 AM PDT
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Erik Moeller <emoeller(a)wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
I tend to agree that a light box or other modalish zoom should become the
default behavior.
-- brion
On May 30, 2013 5:50 AM, "Ryan Kaldari" <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
For years, I have weeped and wailed about people
adding complicated maps
and diagrams as 220px thumbnail images to Wikipedia articles. These sort of
images are virtually useless within an article unless they are displayed at
relatively large sizes. Unfortunately, including them at large sizes
creates a whole new set of problems. Namely, large images mess up the
formatting of the page and cause headers, edit links, and other images to
get jumbled around into strange places (or even overlapping each other on
occasion), especially for people on tablets or other small screens. The
problem is even worse for videos. Who wants to watch a hi-res video in a
tiny 220px inline viewer? If there are subtitles, you can't even read them.
But should we instead include them as giant 1280px players within the
article? That seems like it would be obnoxious.
What if instead we could mark such complicated images and high-res videos
to be shown in modal viewers when the user clicks on them? For example:
[[File:Highres-video1.webm|**thumb|right|modal|A high res video]]. When
you clicked on the thumbnail, instead of going to Commons, a modal viewer
would overlay across the screen and let you view the video/image at high
resolution (complete with a link to Commons and the attribution
information). Believe it or not, this capability already exists for videos
on Wikipedia, but it's basically a hidden feature of TimedMediaHandler. If
you include a video in a page and set the size as 200px or less, it
activates the modal behavior. Unfortunately, the default size for videos is
220px (as of 2010) so you will almost never see this behavior on a real
article. If you want to see it, go to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**
American_Sign_Language#**Variation<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America…
click on one of the videos. Compare that with the video viewing
experience at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Congenital_insensitivity_to_
**pain <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain>.
It's a world of difference. Now imagine that same modal behavior at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Cathedral_Peak_Granodiorite#**
Geological_overview<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Peak_Granodi…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Battle_of_Jutland<https://en.wikipedia.o…
.
Such an idea would be relatively trivial to implement. The steps would be:
1. Add support for a 'modal' param to the [[File:]] handler (
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/**r/#/c/66062/<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org…
)
2. Add support for the 'modal' param to TimedMediaHandler (
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/**r/#/c/66063/<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org…
)
3. Add support for the 'modal' param to images via some core JS module
(not done yet)
As you can see, I've already gotten started on adding this feature for
videos via TimedMediaHandler, but I haven't done anything for images yet. I
would like to hear people's thoughts on this potential feature and how it
could be best implemented for images before doing anything else with it.
What are your thoughts, concerns, ideas?
Ryan Kaldari
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From: Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles
Date: May 30, 2013 12:46:13 AM PDT
To: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Cc: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On 5/29/13 9:21 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
Yes, better support for display of images through
a modal viewer would
be great. I'm not sure a "modal" parameter that has to be explicitly
set for files is the best approach - I would recommend optimizing the
default experience when a user clicks an image or video. It's not
clear that the current behavior based on a pixel threshold is actually
desirable as the default behavior. (On a side note, the TMH behavior
should be improved to actually play the video immediately, not require
a second click to play in modal view.)
Does anyone think it would be a bad idea to just make modal viewing the default for
thumbnailed videos?
Ryan Kaldari
From: Antoine Musso <hashar+wmf(a)free.fr>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles
Date: May 30, 2013 12:52:25 AM PDT
To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Le 30/05/13 05:49, Ryan Kaldari a écrit :
When you clicked on the thumbnail, instead of
going to Commons, a modal
viewer would overlay across the screen and let you view the video/image
at high resolution
<snip>
I discovered yesterday that Commons as such a tool to browse pictures in
a category. Whenever you browse a category page such as:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hackathons
There is a Green icon which when hovered will expand to 'show slideshow'
and when clicked replace the view with a slideshow view like Picassa /
Flickr ...
It would be nice to have that build in MediaWiki. Maybe there is a well
supported JQuery plugin that does just that and we could ship in core?
--
Antoine "hashar" Musso
From: Antoine Musso <hashar+wmf(a)free.fr>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles
Date: May 30, 2013 1:34:35 AM PDT
To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Le 30/05/13 09:46, Ryan Kaldari a écrit :
Does anyone think it would be a bad idea to just
make modal viewing the
default for thumbnailed videos?
Be bold! To play it safe, you can make the feature protected with a
global feature that we will slowly enable on all wiki and eventually
phase out later on :-] This way the code will land everywhere and we
can play test it on beta then on commons ...
--
Antoine "hashar" Musso
"did I say: 'be bold' ?"
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