2016-04-05 8:51 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org:
Special:Translate doesn't work [1] and the current plan is to make it redirect to desktop which is disappointing and I'd guess loses us lots of potential editors (myself included).
When we developed the new interface for Special:Translate (aka TUX) we did some testing that it works on tablets. Is there way to mark it suitable for tablets alone because we have not designed it for smart phones?
And what can we do for the rest? Let them too access TUX acknowledging it will be heavy and clunky? Would it make sense to generate minimal non-JavaScript version for all the rest using which they can get the job done if they are desperate but without all the advanced features of the regular TUX UI?
Or in short, I am wondering whether "mobile support" is all or nothing, or whether there is some middle way where we can have some quick wins if the alternative is to have no support at all?
To take a more concrete example of impact on mobile - we've made the mobile skin play nicely with language interwiki links (we've even dedicated this entire quarter to improving language switching on mobile web [2] ). On the other hand, the languages tag does not work the same way as an interwiki link. It does it's own thing which is sadly suffering from usability issues on mobile [3].
This is technical debt. After over a year long push on Content Translation, the Language team is now dedicating some time to address high priority bugs in Translate and Universal Language Selector. There is some related work happening such as the "compact interlanguage links out of beta" and a soon 2 year old patch in Translate to improve the display of the language list [1]. It would be useful to look at the big picture here but there likely isn't enough time beyond fixing the most obvious for now.
[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/149585/
I hope my views on this are a little clearer to you now and apologies for putting you on the defensive if I did.
Thanks for the explanation, because it was not obvious to me what are the pain points from your point of view. For the usability issues you listed, they do affect desktop users as well, but I do appreciate that they are more severe on mobile. For performance, is that only about the unsuitable output from <languages> tag or is there more to it?
I'd love to see our new language switcher compatible with the output of the translate tag and the translation mechanisms available on mobile phones, so readers can view translations and edit seamlessly around our projects.
This is helpful and I will consider it when prioritizing work. I am not well aware of your current priorities [2], but if you think this is important, would you consider helping us on this issue?
[2] I am having hard time navigating through outdated pages on mediawiki.org. Is this the place to look: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects ?
-Niklas