Brion Vibber wrote: 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

On Nov 26, 2005, at 9:04 PM, Jama Poulsen wrote: 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

S. Woodside wrote: 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? 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 Nov 27, 2005, at 9:56 AM, Alfio Puglisi wrote: 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 -- http://simonwoodside.com

Carl Witty wrote: 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: 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.