Hi, all... I'd like to revive some interest in improving support for mobile browsers.
Extremely limited WAP-based browsers are at least sort of served by the experimental WAP gateway, but there are a lot of smartphones and other handheld devices that get on the "real" web with greater or lesser degrees of success, and I'd like to see us improve the default look & feel of MediaWiki on them.
At the moment I think we can roughly divide the mobile browsers into two categories:
* Those that render much like a full desktop browser and let you zoom as necessary (iPhone/Mobile Safari, Opera Mini, ...?)
* Those that have very limited CSS and JavaScript or strip a lot of stuff down (Opera Mini in "mobile view" mode, most others?)
At the moment, all I've got access to are an iPhone and the Opera Mini simulator applet, so that's what I'll be putting the occasional bit of time into. These already pretty much "just work", but the UI can be very awkward due to the desktop-size layout; I'd like a cleaner handheld stylesheet that lets most pages be legible when you get to them.
If you've got another device and you'd like to help testing and developing for it, please stake your claim at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_browser_testing
Alternatively if you've got a spare device you can donate to us, that'd be great too! (Especially if it doesn't need a service subscription to get on the net...)
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
On Jan 20, 2008 6:12 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
Extremely limited WAP-based browsers are at least sort of served by the experimental WAP gateway, but there are a lot of smartphones and other handheld devices that get on the "real" web with greater or lesser degrees of success, and I'd like to see us improve the default look & feel of MediaWiki on them.
Let's go for XHTML MP (Mobile profile), which is currently used by m.yahoo.com & google.com/m.
We shouldn't care too much for the clients (there are too many...), if mediawiki / wikipedia can support XHTML MP, it is very useful already.
Howard
Brion Vibber schrieb:
- Those that render much like a full desktop browser and let you zoom as
necessary (iPhone/Mobile Safari, Opera Mini, ...?)
- Those that have very limited CSS and JavaScript or strip a lot of
stuff down (Opera Mini in "mobile view" mode, most others?)
What about the Amazon Kindle? According to its article, you can access wikipedia, but no idea how this works.
Marco
PS: Does the Kindle stuff work outside the US or is this some US limited?
On 1/20/08, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
If you've got another device and you'd like to help testing and developing for it, please stake your claim at:
Maybe if there were some test cases, people could try them on hteir phones and report back? I'd be happy to. (Sony Ericsson K610i here, standard browser...whatever that is)
Another idea might be a custom app like the Gmail one which works really really well. Said app would assign the search box to a key or something...
Fwiw, I find that browsing on the phone is acceptable, if improvable. Trying it now the biggest issue seems to be some fonts are way too big (headings etc should all probably be rendered as standard size with bold), and some trivial text (disambig links etc) ends up taking a lot of space. infoboxes display pretty badly. You almost want to just display 'infobox' as a link rather than the full thing. And perhaps the [edit] section links should be suppressed? Who the hell wants to edit Wikipedia from their phone? :)
Steve
On 21/01/2008, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Fwiw, I find that browsing on the phone is acceptable, if improvable. Trying it now the biggest issue seems to be some fonts are way too big (headings etc should all probably be rendered as standard size with bold), and some trivial text (disambig links etc) ends up taking a lot of space. infoboxes display pretty badly. You almost want to just display 'infobox' as a link rather than the full thing. And perhaps the [edit] section links should be suppressed? Who the hell wants to edit Wikipedia from their phone? :)
Didn't you watch the promo video we just had for the fundraiser? My most vivid memory from it is of a woman in Indonesia editing Wikipedia with a fullsize keyboard hooked up to her mobile phone. So be careful with the assumptions. :)
cheers Brianna
On 1/21/08, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Didn't you watch the promo video we just had for the fundraiser? My most vivid memory from it is of a woman in Indonesia editing Wikipedia with a fullsize keyboard hooked up to her mobile phone. So be careful with the assumptions. :)
Heh, fair point. Ok, assume that there is a range of devices which would classify as "mobile", and perhaps we can't immediately tell how good the interface is when a user connects. We should probably default to something pretty basic, and, for those with the means to do so, have a 'view' menu or something where you can crank up your experience.
Incidentally, one thing that actually works really well is footnotes: on my phone browser you tend to be selecting links all the time, so you just 'click' when you're on an interesting footnote, it jumps to the definition, and you 'click' again to be back where you started. Very convenient. What doesn't work so well: pipetricked links [[tubgirl|like this one]] as there's really no way to tell where a link is going before you follow it.
Image captions also look pretty crappy and are hard to distinguish from the main text.
Links back to the title on each section would be handy, too.
And the toolbox could really be trimmed down: all that stuff like 'what links here' and 'community portal' and stuff is pretty much irrelevant for the basic use case. If someone is reduced to browsing wikipedia on their phone, it's most likely that they desperately need some piece of information to answer a query or a bet or something. It wouldn't be unreasonable to hide all that extra guff behind some link like 'toolbox' or something.
Steve
On 22/01/2008, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Heh, fair point. Ok, assume that there is a range of devices which would classify as "mobile", and perhaps we can't immediately tell how good the interface is when a user connects. We should probably default to something pretty basic, and, for those with the means to do so, have a 'view' menu or something where you can crank up your experience.
The obvious answer that springs to mind is a suitable skin; and so as not to presume the device is too stupid, the harder but better answer would be going over Monobook with an eye to graceful degradation.
- d.
On Jan 21, 2008 9:05 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
And the toolbox could really be trimmed down: all that stuff like 'what links here' and 'community portal' and stuff is pretty much irrelevant for the basic use case. If someone is reduced to browsing wikipedia on their phone, it's most likely that they desperately need some piece of information to answer a query or a bet or something. It wouldn't be unreasonable to hide all that extra guff behind some link like 'toolbox' or something.
Isn't that already all the way at the bottom of the page? Also, it's in a <ul>, so at least some mobile clients (I think one of Opera's, at least) collapse it by default.
On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 02:12:01AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
At the moment I think we can roughly divide the mobile browsers into two categories:
- Those that render much like a full desktop browser and let you zoom as
necessary (iPhone/Mobile Safari, Opera Mini, ...?)
- Those that have very limited CSS and JavaScript or strip a lot of
stuff down (Opera Mini in "mobile view" mode, most others?)
There's a middle case: the Blackberry browser doesn't zoom, but it *will* do images, CSS, JScript... if you turn them on. I don't, and I still get a pretty decent Wikipedia experience.
One thing that drives me up a tree, which we *don't* do (happily) is see that the browser looks mobile, and forcibly restrict the user to a reduced experience that they may not want.
Worse are news sites mobilized by, like, mDog, which hijack perfectly useful URLs supplied to me by sites like Slashdot or Drudge (both tech and general news sites use mDog and it's brethren), and hammer me back to a mobilized homepage, ignoring the story I was trying to link to.
We don't do that either. Thank ghod.
As someone else noted, if a set of test pages is assembled, I'd be glad to report, from my POV.
Cheers, -- jra
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