Yesterday I went to check a thingy on Wiki by using my cellphone. I don't know about other cellphones, but on my model (Sony Ericsson Z530i), the mainpage is divided into four pages. You scroll down and click on Next Page to browse through the pages. Depending on article length, every page is divided into two or more pages.
The thing that makes it uncomfortable is the search option which is placed at the bottom of the last page. If you want to search for something, you'll have to browse to the last page and scroll all the way down. Since this is done on the cellphone and not on a computer, it's obviously not very userfriendly. I don't know if anyone took in consideration cellphone surfing when creating the Wiki pages, but it would be more convinient to have the search option at the top of the first page. Or at least somewhere in the middle. Just a tought.
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On 15/08/06, Anittas Hatti anittas_of_wiki@yahoo.com wrote:
The thing that makes it uncomfortable is the search option which is placed at the bottom of the last page. If you want to search for something, you'll have to browse to the last page and scroll all the way down. Since this is done on the cellphone and not on a computer, it's obviously not very userfriendly. I don't know if anyone took in consideration cellphone surfing when creating the Wiki pages, but it would be more convinient to have the search option at the top of the first page. Or at least somewhere in the middle. Just a tought.
How is it in the Classic or Simple skin?
- d.
On 8/15/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
How is it in the Classic or Simple skin?
Is there a way where you can get the simple view, without having to go through preferences? It'd be great if we had something like en.wikipedia.org/wikisimple/Some_Page...
Steve
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=standard
On 8/15/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/15/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
How is it in the Classic or Simple skin?
Is there a way where you can get the simple view, without having to go through preferences? It'd be great if we had something like en.wikipedia.org/wikisimple/Some_Page...
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 8/15/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=standard
Ah, cool. I notice that this works as well (slightly simpler) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=simple
I notice that with really old browsers (my good old netscape communicator 4 still works :)) you get an even simpler view with no tables or CSS, and all the stuff that's normally in the left sidebar ends up as text down the bottom. Still pretty usable...
Maybe the problem with this mobile phone is that it's actually too smart, and is requesting a level of XHTML that it's not really capable of displaying?
Steve
On 8/15/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/15/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=standard
Ah, cool. I notice that this works as well (slightly simpler) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=simple
If you go to your preferences where you choose your skin you can see links to previews of all of the skins. They use this format.
--Oskar
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/15/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
How is it in the Classic or Simple skin?
Is there a way where you can get the simple view, without having to go through preferences? It'd be great if we had something like en.wikipedia.org/wikisimple/Some_Page...
Steve _______________________________________________
Just a thought: mobile phone and PDA users will generally be using specialized browser software, doing so through HTML-to-WAP gateways, or proxies that attempt to simplify pages for rendering on small screens. If we could auto-detect these by User-Agent string, and use a custom skin for these clients, we could greatly improve the experience for small-screen users.
I've found lists of mobile client browser strings at
http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html and http://www.cantoni.org/2005/02/03/mobile-ua
Google's wireless proxy apparently reports itself as
"Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Google Wireless Transcoder;)", according to http://cleverhack.com/2006/08/06/google-wap-proxy-user-agent/
and some information on the i-mode user agent is provided here:
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/i/tag/s2.html http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/i/spec/useragent.html
There is a sourceforge project that provides a LGPL'd Perl class for mobile user agent sniffing which claims to work correctly for over 2000 different mobile devices:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mobileuseragent/
-- Neil
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/15/06, David Gerard <
How is it in the Classic or Simple skin?
Is there a way where you can get the simple view, without having to go through preferences? It'd be great if we had something like en.wikipedia.org/wikisimple/Some_Page...
Steve
What about using en.wapedia.org? Note: i just found it's not a rendering change hosted by the WMF.
Neil Harris wrote:
If we could auto-detect these by User-Agent string, and use a custom skin for these clients, we could greatly improve the experience for small-screen users.
Did you try the "Chick" skin? It is designed for hand-held devices. Well, more precisely, I originally designed it for Pocket IE, the Internet Explorer version on Pocket PC PDAs.
Timwi
Anittas Hatti wrote:
Yesterday I went to check a thingy on Wiki by using my cellphone. I don't know about other cellphones, but on my model (Sony Ericsson Z530i), the mainpage is divided into four pages. You scroll down and click on Next Page to browse through the pages. Depending on article length, every page is divided into two or more pages.
The thing that makes it uncomfortable is the search option which is placed at the bottom of the last page. If you want to search for something, you'll have to browse to the last page and scroll all the way down. Since this is done on the cellphone and not on a computer, it's obviously not very userfriendly. I don't know if anyone took in consideration cellphone surfing when creating the Wiki pages, but it would be more convinient to have the search option at the top of the first page. Or at least somewhere in the middle. Just a tought.
They aren't official Wikimedia Foundation projects, but there are a couple of attempts at bringing Wikipedia content to WAP devices: [[w:en:Wikipedia:WAP access]] discusses a few of them.
Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]]