Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/15/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
How is it in the Classic or Simple skin?
Is there a way where you can get the simple view, without having to go through preferences? It'd be great if we had something like en.wikipedia.org/wikisimple/Some_Page...
Steve _______________________________________________
Just a thought: mobile phone and PDA users will generally be using specialized browser software, doing so through HTML-to-WAP gateways, or proxies that attempt to simplify pages for rendering on small screens. If we could auto-detect these by User-Agent string, and use a custom skin for these clients, we could greatly improve the experience for small-screen users.
I've found lists of mobile client browser strings at
http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html and http://www.cantoni.org/2005/02/03/mobile-ua
Google's wireless proxy apparently reports itself as
"Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Google Wireless Transcoder;)", according to http://cleverhack.com/2006/08/06/google-wap-proxy-user-agent/
and some information on the i-mode user agent is provided here:
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/i/tag/s2.html http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/p_s/i/spec/useragent.html
There is a sourceforge project that provides a LGPL'd Perl class for mobile user agent sniffing which claims to work correctly for over 2000 different mobile devices:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mobileuseragent/
-- Neil
Do cell-phones correctly use stylesheets that are declared for @mobile? Because if they do use those, then that should help at least as much as switching to Simple, provided someone wants to write up mobile CSS (do we have some already?) Of course, ideally we'd also want to cut back on image resolution and whatnot (for which UA strings would presumably be needed if we wanted to skip preferences).
Simetrical wrote:
Do cell-phones correctly use stylesheets that are declared for @mobile? Because if they do use those, then that should help at least as much as switching to Simple, provided someone wants to write up mobile CSS (do we have some already?) Of course, ideally we'd also want to cut back on image resolution and whatnot (for which UA strings would presumably be needed if we wanted to skip preferences).
I just got a sidekick 3 phone, which has a nice big screen. Wikipedia does not look good on it. One problem is that I have to scroll through far too much auxiliary stuff before I can see the articles.
I have no idea what the answer to this is, but it would be cool if it worked better. :)
On 15/08/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I just got a sidekick 3 phone, which has a nice big screen. Wikipedia does not look good on it. One problem is that I have to scroll through far too much auxiliary stuff before I can see the articles.
You should see links at the top of the page which allow jumping to content or navigation.
Rob Church
On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 09:22:00AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Simetrical wrote:
Do cell-phones correctly use stylesheets that are declared for @mobile? Because if they do use those, then that should help at least as much as switching to Simple, provided someone wants to write up mobile CSS (do we have some already?) Of course, ideally we'd also want to cut back on image resolution and whatnot (for which UA strings would presumably be needed if we wanted to skip preferences).
I just got a sidekick 3 phone, which has a nice big screen. Wikipedia does not look good on it. One problem is that I have to scroll through far too much auxiliary stuff before I can see the articles.
I have no idea what the answer to this is, but it would be cool if it worked better. :)
Oddly, I would bet that your phone's browser *is* trying to interpret CSS, and that's why it looks bad: our layout puts the article first, and the navigation at the bottom, then relies on CSS to pull the nav up where it "belongs". Check to see if your browser has a "turn CSS off" knob, and see if turning it off helps any.
Cheers, -- jra
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I just got a sidekick 3 phone, which has a nice big screen. Wikipedia does not look good on it. One problem is that I have to scroll through far too much auxiliary stuff before I can see the articles.
I have no idea what the answer to this is, but it would be cool if it worked better. :)
If you'll buy us some fancy cell phones, we'll see what we can do. ;)
In all seriousness, phone browsers are *hard* to deal with, since there's huge huge variance in how much of which standards they obey, or try to fake, and it seems to be hard to test on them if, well, you don't have one handy.
In an ideal world, the vendors should have fully-capable emulators available for free download and evaluation by web developers, so their products will actually be useful to the public. I'm not sure that's the case, though, at least the last time I checked. If someone has more experience in this regard, please let us know.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On 8/15/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
In all seriousness, phone browsers are *hard* to deal with, since there's huge huge variance in how much of which standards they obey, or try to fake, and it seems to be hard to test on them if, well, you don't have one handy.
In an ideal world, the vendors should have fully-capable emulators available for free download and evaluation by web developers, so their products will actually be useful to the public. I'm not sure that's the case, though, at least the last time I checked. If someone has more experience in this regard, please let us know.
Isn't Opera one of the leaders of the cell phone browser market? It has pages on designing stuff for its small-screen browsers: http://my.opera.com/community/dev/
In an ideal world, the vendors should have fully-capable emulators available for free download and evaluation by web developers, so their products will actually be useful to the public.
It appears to have a simulator in the device's SDK: http://developer.danger.com/site/faq/show#q28 http://developer.danger.com/site/docs/quicksim http://developer.danger.com/site/simulator
However it sounds convoluted to set up, you seem to need to request a special account (and to already own one of these devices) to use it, there's no guarantee that the simulator actually includes the device's web browser, and you may have to agree to an EULA that involves signing over your first-born child.
In short, I'd hold out for an actual physical phone if I were you! ;-)
All the best, Nick.
On 8/15/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I just got a sidekick 3 phone, which has a nice big screen. Wikipedia does not look good on it. One problem is that I have to scroll through far too much auxiliary stuff before I can see the articles.
I have no idea what the answer to this is, but it would be cool if it worked better. :)
Hmm, try installing Opera on your phone. It actually does an excellent job at displaying Wikipedia pages. You do have to scroll past infoboxes and images, but I can't think of anywhere else it could put them, so fair's fair. (You can test this with recent versions of desktop Opera: it has a "small screen" mode that emulates its mobile version's rendering.)
Maybe enwiki should class infoboxes and hide them by default in its handheld stylesheet, hmm.
On 8/15/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
Do cell-phones correctly use stylesheets that are declared for @mobile?
Whoops, that should be @media handheld. And no, we don't have a handheld stylesheet. http://bugs.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7020
On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 11:03:09AM +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
Just a thought: mobile phone and PDA users will generally be using specialized browser software, doing so through HTML-to-WAP gateways, or proxies that attempt to simplify pages for rendering on small screens. If we could auto-detect these by User-Agent string, and use a custom skin for these clients, we could greatly improve the experience for small-screen users.
FWIW, the standard skinnage devolves *quite* nicely on my Blackberry's browser, with no transcoder. That's HTML with no CSS.
Cheers, -- jra
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