Hi, i'm the administrator of a Java italian website, javastaff.com. We are a group of developers and we would like to create a J2ME client for Wikipedia, that would be an interesting software for a cellular phone. Of course we will do it only to donate a good software to the users. I have already talked with Jimmy Wales and he is entusiast of this project. We have already studied the structure of Wikipedia and we have done experiment parsing the information with a search on your website, but i would like to know if there is some page we can access to perform a better search (only text for example or a webservice or something else). I hope you like this idea :)
Best regards
--------------------------------------------------- Federico Paparoni JavaStaff.com Admin <doc>In girum imus nocte et consumimur ign</doc> ---------------------------------------------------
On Sun, Nov 27, 2005 at 01:41:26AM +0100, Federico Paparoni wrote:
i'm the administrator of a Java italian website, javastaff.com. We are a group of developers and we would like to create a J2ME client for Wikipedia, that would be an interesting software for a cellular phone. Of course we will do it only to donate a good software to the users.
See: http://www.en.wapedia.org
I asked the author of that site (Florian Amrhein) if he wanted to release his parser tool as free software, but he wanted to clean it up first.
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.
Jama Poulsen http://wikicompany.org http://debianlinux.net
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.
MediaWiki is pretty sparse about tables, last I checked. The MonoBook skin is CSS-based and pretty table-free. There might be a couple still hiding around, please let us know if so.
If you're talking about what *people on Wikipedia* do in spicing up pages with unnecessary, wasteful, stupid, non-portable markup, that's a different matter.
Tables should never be abused like that, and if you see it happening you should speak up in that place.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
If you're talking about what *people on Wikipedia* do in spicing up pages with unnecessary, wasteful, stupid, non-portable markup, that's a different matter.
MediaWiki is not entirely innocent here because it encourages this behaviour. By far the easiest way to achieve the layouts people want is by using stupid, non-portable mark-up. Wanting to achieve a good layout, however, is neither unnecessary nor wasteful.
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
If you're talking about what *people on Wikipedia* do in spicing up pages with unnecessary, wasteful, stupid, non-portable markup, that's a different matter.
MediaWiki is not entirely innocent here because it encourages this behaviour. By far the easiest way to achieve the layouts people want is by using stupid, non-portable mark-up. Wanting to achieve a good layout, however, is neither unnecessary nor wasteful.
Indeed. It should be remembered that most (if not almost all) contributors in Wikipedia are not knowledgable or even aware of HTML.
-- Jamie ------------------------------------------------------------------- http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/ Thank you to JosephM for inviting me to Gmail! Have lots of invites. Gmail now has 2GB.
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
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Moin,
On Sunday 27 November 2005 08:39, S. Woodside wrote:
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:
[snipabit]
Just to plug shamelessly one of my projects:
http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/
When graphs/flowcharts/relationships are not rendered as PNG but as HTML or ASCII, like so:
# echo '[ Server ] -- HTTP --> [ Mobile\nClient ]' | perl as_ascii
+--------+ +--------+ | Server | HTTP | Mobile | | | ------> | Client | +--------+ +--------+
Then the mobile user would have it easier to zoom the "image". The download size might even be smaller, the example above is 804 bytes as compressed PNG, but only about 100 bytes uncompressed text.
Best wishes,
Tels
- -- Signed on Sun Nov 27 10:36:50 2005 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.
"Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone." -- Unknown
S. Woodside wrote:
Long articles - basically your average mobile user is going to be unhappy if they download a 50KB + article.
Why? Do those phones have such little memory that they can't cope with that? Or are the browsers so crap they can't display the beginning of the page until all 50KB are loaded?
The ideal way to solve this in my opinion would be some kind of automatic pagination of long articles.
I would find *that* annoying - I would have to keep clicking and loading more and more pages to get to different parts of an article.
Timwi
On 11/27/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
S. Woodside wrote:
Long articles - basically your average mobile user is going to be unhappy if they download a 50KB + article.
Why? Do those phones have such little memory that they can't cope with that? Or are the browsers so crap they can't display the beginning of the page until all 50KB are loaded?
Some mobile phone users pay their data connection according to the number of KB transferred. Good for reading text-only email, but not for much else.
Alfio
On Nov 27, 2005, at 9:56 AM, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
On 11/27/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
S. Woodside wrote:
Long articles - basically your average mobile user is going to be unhappy if they download a 50KB + article.
Why? Do those phones have such little memory that they can't cope with that? Or are the browsers so crap they can't display the beginning of the page until all 50KB are loaded?
Some mobile phone users pay their data connection according to the number of KB transferred. Good for reading text-only email, but not for much else.
I think that it's more accurate to say "most" mobile phone users. Including a lot of users who have "unlimited" plans that do actually have a cap.
The other reason is that mobile data speeds are currently on par roughly with a 14.4 modem, so that size matters for speed. 3G is faster, but it's not coming in very quickly.
Here's another thing: in low-income nations, mobile clients might actually be WAY more available to the average person than a desktop client! The trend for mobile data in the developing nations is HUGE.
--simon
On Sun, 2005-11-27 at 02:39 -0500, S. Woodside wrote:
Wikipedia actually displays pretty well in mobile browsers.
Well, some mobile browsers, perhaps...it's quite broken on my Treo 650 (the entire article text is rendered one-character-per-line, l i k e
t h i s ).
There's an extensive discussion of workarounds (interrupt the download after the article is downloaded but before the CSS is, change skins, use custom CSS) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Browser_notes, but for a naive not-logged-in user, wikipedia is one of the few sites I've found that would be impossible to use from a Treo 650.
Carl Witty
Carl Witty wrote:
There's an extensive discussion of workarounds (interrupt the download after the article is downloaded but before the CSS is, change skins, use custom CSS) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Browser_notes, but for a naive not-logged-in user, wikipedia is one of the few sites I've found that would be impossible to use from a Treo 650.
Somebody with access to these kinds of devices needs to test style sheet modifications and provide us with a patch.
A standards-compliant handheld browser should accept special markers in the CSS for handheld devices, which can be used to provide a more legible presentation.
Some googling shows that the Treo 650 is not a team player in this area, but that it does do some JavaScript; in that case it may be possible to slip in a JS hack for it.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Carl Witty wrote:
On Sun, 2005-11-27 at 02:39 -0500, S. Woodside wrote:
Wikipedia actually displays pretty well in mobile browsers.
Well, some mobile browsers, perhaps...it's quite broken on my Treo 650
Just get a MobiPocket static dump, or a TomeRaider one. Fulltext search included.
Magnus
Carl Witty wrote:
On Sun, 2005-11-27 at 02:39 -0500, S. Woodside wrote:
Wikipedia actually displays pretty well in mobile browsers.
Well, some mobile browsers, perhaps...it's quite broken on my Treo 650 (the entire article text is rendered one-character-per-line, l i k e
Palm browsers are notoriously shit and almost not worth bothering with. The browser in User:Redcountess' Zire 72s (PalmOS 5.2.8 with Novarra Web Pro 3.5) does okay on en: Wikipedia (I even posted to the sandbox with it!), but the one on User:Arkady Rose's Tungsten C (PalmOS 5.2.1 with PalmSource Web Browser 2.0) - which would otherwise be *ideal* for Wikipedia, given it's got inbuilt wifi and is basically a handheld wardriving appliance ;-) - looks like utterly misrendered dogshit.
The Treo 650 runs PalmOS 5.4.x - what browser and version does it include?
The only problem with Web Pro 3.5 is that it doesn't do UTF-8 characters at all, so it's only really usable on a language that works in 7-bit (such as en:). Otherwise it was great. I know you can buy 3.0 or 3.5 as an upgrade for the Tungsten C, so you might be able to get something less shit for the Treo.
I'm currently writing [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia on PDAs]], and will be uploading photos demonstrating the above in a while. Others are heartily encouraged to add their own experiences and photos.
[cc: to wikien-l - please add your own!]
- d.
On Sun, 2005-12-04 at 01:03 +0000, David Gerard wrote:
The Treo 650 runs PalmOS 5.4.x - what browser and version does it include?
The built-in browser says "palmOne Blazer v4.0" in its About box. It works quite well for dozens of web sites I've tried, except for Wikipedia.
I also have a copy of Xiino 3.4.1E; this works fine for reading Wikipedia articles. (The en front page looks a bit strange, because it keeps the two-column format, resulting in very narrow columns on the Palm screen.)
(Sorry for the delayed response.)
Carl Witty
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org