Your email client seems to have mangled the indenting for some reason, so I tried to repair it. Apologies if I've messed anything up in the process.
On 15/11/15 09:47, Jon Robson wrote:
On 15 Nov 2015 2:31 p.m., "Isarra Yos" zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that it's important to move away from desktop-first, but switching to mobile-first isn't the answer either.
Why not? Whats wrong with a fixed width centered site? Old phones do not have media query support nor do they have ability to support conditional statements.
It doesn't work for MediaWiki. As a product, it is too complicated, has too many modes and tools, to effectively communicate to the user what they can and cannot do using only simple styles. (I assume you mean max-width, since just fixed width doesn't work on mobile anyway.)
When you have more space, you can tell them more. When you have less space, you need to use other affordances to tell them things, and hide links and tools behind menus, but this adds to the steps required for both discovery and use, and should only be done when you have no other options. For desktop users who actually do have the space to lay the important things out, having everything hidden behind buttons and menus is simply not fair - or useful.
For complex products (discussion boards, skins, anything that could benefit from a lot of space), there are going mobile-specific styles same as any other resolution - do ANY as the 'main', and you're having to undo and override those styles on every other one, which results in unnecessarily complicated and large code, which just makes it all that much harder to maintain and work with.
As an example, this is an important part of why it's been so hard to make Vector properly responsive - so many of the desktop styles needed to be overridden in order for any mobile design to be applied. (This would have applied in either direction because its desktop and mobile layouts are so completely different.) But suppose that same step had been replaced with instead separating out the desktop styles into a separate stylesheet for a similar amount of effort, and with each as separate, independent stylesheets - code for both desktop and mobile would be made cleaner, and far easier to iterate upon.
This will never happen. True mobile development is a lot more than moving around styles.
True mobile development is nothing more than developing for mobile. You lay things out and use the tools mobile affords - same as any other platform. You just need to actually do this for ALL your platforms. Including mobile. Including desktop. Including screen readers.
For example the current responsive vector skin that exists in an experimental state sits at the bottom of the page which is a dead zone. I'm yet to see any good examples of this done well.
What exactly do you mean? Is this a bug in the implementation in which the entire skin shows up off the page on mobile or something?
Or are you referring to the navigation? Because yes, that definitely needs work. I was under the impression nobody had actually gotten to that part yet; my point was more that the skin now renders on mobile in a legible fashion at all, which was previously not the case with the sidebars and tabs and whatnot.
You want a responsive skin though. What you are describing is not one. A responsive site uses the same stylesheet for both desktop and mobile.
'Responsive', in reference to websites, means that the site layout responds to and renders well regardless of the size of or device type on which it is displayed.
A single set of styles for everything can be made to work (or even no styles, technically speaking - just look at motherfuckingwebsite.com), but also introduces serious limitations in terms of what can be done for each, which in particular poses problems for MediaWiki for the reasons I explained above (yes, you can still do it; it's just not exactly optimal). But the fact of the matter is that the entire reason @media size queries were introduced in the first place was mitigate this sort of thing by allowing for more specific styles to be employed, optimised for the different displays and taking full advantage of their different features. This is exactly what it is for, and we should be using it for this.
(People wanted me to iterate on what's there now and I couldn't even figure out where to begin. Not that I'm that good at CSS in the first place, but that code is scary.)
What we need to do is get better at distinguishing and leveraging the common styles, and using common variables and mixins, because this is how you make consistent overall styles and also simplify the overall thing. Then build these into something that works for each platform.
And if we're going to support stupid broken things, we need to explicitly support them with some sort of fallback that doesn't require a lot of manual rejigging. I'm not sure IE8, as an ancient desktop browser, getting mobile styles is really any better than an ancient mobile browser getting desktop styles.
Why not?
Effective mobile navigation on a platform of this complexity almost exclusively requires javascript to function due to the extremely limited space it must be optimised for. This includes popups, accordion menus, expanding sections, anything where the content is initially hidden and only made visible upon user action.
IE8 will soon not be served javascript.
Other experts in the field far more qualified than myself think so. For example https://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/the-guardians-take-on-mobile-first... There are countless more if you Google.
Does the Guardian use the same interface for authoring, editing and publishing as it does for reading? Does the Guardian only serve js to IE9+?
Those experts are discussing what applies to them, but we have our own use cases, our own problems. What works for others will not necessarily work for us because we are doing different things. But we can still look at and learn from these other things; we just also need to consider why they did what they did and whether those reasons apply to us. We can't blindly follow others, in other fields, when we are the pathfinders in our own field.