On 11 May 2016 at 12:50, Michael Peel <email@mikepeel.net> wrote:

Isn't it time to start moving to responsive mediawiki templates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design), rather than having a separate mobile interface/URL?

For a practical example, see the BBC News website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news), which is the same website on all devices, it just rescales the content/navigation/layout to suit the device. (Try resizing your web browser on your computer to the size of a mobile web browser to see what I mean.)

Hey Mike,

I think you're confusing two things – a single skin with responsive design for all users on all devices, which is a long-term ambition, but for the Reading department to talk about :-) – and responsive templates for content, which we're working on in terms of scoped styling for templates through TemplateStyles (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TemplateStyles, though by "we" I mostly mean Coren as a volunteer developer). This second one is going through security review right now, but once that's complete we'll enable it for testing and gradual roll-out.

Scoped styling of templates will let template authors make their templates work on any sized device, which will massively improve the terrible experience from templates like infoboxes, navboxes, amboxes, and especially one-off templates like those used by the Signpost. However, it'll need a concerted effort from all of us to re-write and improve all the thousands of templates across our hundreds of wikis to make this a reality. It requires judgement, æsthetics and expertise, and so isn't something that can be done automatically by software. It's a big effort, but it's going to be worth it. :-)

James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester