On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Jon Robson <jrobson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
The more I
think about it, the more I think, in its current state
mobile should not collapse sections by default. If you really want to
find a lower section, scrolling down the page and being able to
collapse a section to see the next one is easy, yet if you just want
to read the article in its entirety it is annoying to have to click to
expand a section.
Well, to me that's a good argument for continuing to collapse (or otherwise
avoid rendering) the lower sections -- they're less likely to be read at
all, so why waste CPU time and bandwidth on them? My typical Wikipedia
inquiries are resolved primarily by the first paragraph or infobox, and
maybe skimming one or two sections whose titles sounded relevant...
Of course since we're transferring the text data anyway, it may not save
much resources to just collapse/hide the text as we do now. Smarter
behavior on lazy-loading of images might accomplish the bandwidth goals
even better...
Another thing to consider is that if we don't collapse the intermediate
sections, and we don't also devise an alternate table of contents, people
may never get to the later sections because it takes a LOT of scrolling to
get to them. Yes, you can collapse each section one by one and not have to
scroll much, but that strikes me a more difficult interaction to discover
than expanding each section in turn...
Def worth investigating. :)
-- brion