Since I started working on MediaWiki in the mobile team a common
complaint has been "why do I have to make my homepage mobile friendly"
(especially during Wikimania 2012). As background - currently Main
Pages have to be marked up specially for mobile [1].
Although I share the hate (this has been a long standing bug [2]) - if
I'd been around in the early days would have prevented from happening
- I believe people are more inclined to fix ugly broken things then
fix things that do the job.
The main problem here is that the majority of wiki projects have
homepages that are extremely badly written for mobile. There are
various hacks that we can do our end but there is no guarantee these
will work on older phones without a massive rewrite. The main
offenders are typically inline styles which are near impossible to
predict/override/control (many people familiar with me know all about
my vendetta against them [4]) and the use of tables which are also
problematic on mobile.
Luckily with a recent change it's now easier to see what is wrong with
your favourite Wiki homepage even after lots of hacks from our end. If
you opt into the experimental mode [4] and visit the home page it will
no longer be special cased and inline styles on it will be scrubbed
with javascript enabled...
I'd encourage anyone who cares about killing this 'feature' of
MobileFrontend with fire to reassess their favourite homepages.
Suggested actions after opting into experimental mode:
* Disable javascript and see what your homepage looks like with inline
styles - edit the main page to make any inline styles that involve
pixels or %s's more mobile friendly and where possible and reusable
move these inline styles to css rules in MediaWiki:Common.css which is
not run on mobile.
* Add the class nomobile to elements which should not be shown on mobile.
If there is enough traction/interest here I'd be keen to make no
special casing an opt in configurable global feature. It would be nice
to have consistent mobile and desktop views. If there's no interest
that's cool as well - it just means I can resolve this long standing
bug as RESOLVED WONTFIX :)
Let me know either way... FWIW Wikivoyage and Wikipedia are almost
there in terms of mobile friendliness without any special casing...
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/Mobile_Gateway#Mobile_homepa…
[2]
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30405
[3]
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35704
[4]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MobileOptions&retu…