On Nov 26, 2005, at 9:04 PM, Jama Poulsen wrote:
An interesting quote from our discussion several
months ago:
"The problem is, that in mediawiki there is no separation between
layout and content. Everywhere tables are used to make layout.
As long this is not repaired - I think this is a major error,
because
CMS Systems should provide such a separation and stand on it - I can
not display tables."
So there are some major challenges to viewing Wikipedia articles in
other ways. Using a tableless infobox rendering system (with
stylesheet
support) would be a good start.
Wikipedia actually displays pretty well in mobile browsers. These are
some of the standard problems:
Too much chrome - mobiles have small screens and the users want to
get straight to the content instead of scroll, scroll, scroll past
the same chrome all the time. WP could use CSS display:none to get
rid of this though (in combination with the media="handheld" include
directive for CSS).
Long articles - basically your average mobile user is going to be
unhappy if they download a 50KB + article. The ideal way to solve
this in my opinion would be some kind of automatic pagination of long
articles.
Large images - again it's a big download. If WP could create smaller
thumbs of the images for mobiles that would be sweet. Again some kind
of media="handheld" hacking could maybe be used for this. (Or browser
detection.....)
It would be really cool if wikipedia took a forefront in developing
pages that used CSS handheld and other techniques properly to look
good in both regular browsers and also on mobile phones. You can use
Opera's "Small Screen" option to emulate a mobile that has proper CSS
support. You can see some of the techniques I described above in
action at my site (
http://semacode.org/ )...
--simon