On 11 May 2016, at 22:07, James Forrester
<jforrester(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 11 May 2016 at 12:50, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:
Isn't it time to start moving to responsive
mediawiki templates (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design), rather than having
a separate mobile interface/URL?
For a practical example, see the BBC News website
(
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news), which is the same website on all devices, it
just rescales the content/navigation/layout to suit the device. (Try
resizing your web browser on your computer to the size of a mobile web
browser to see what I mean.)
Hey Mike,
I think you're confusing two things – a single skin with responsive design
for all users on all devices, which is a long-term ambition, but for the
Reading department to talk about :-) – and responsive templates for
content, which we're working on in terms of scoped styling for templates
through TemplateStyles (
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TemplateStyles, though by "we" I
mostly mean Coren as a volunteer developer). This second one is going
through security review right now, but once that's complete we'll enable it
for testing and gradual roll-out.
Scoped styling of templates will let template authors make their templates
work on any sized device, which will massively improve the terrible
experience from templates like infoboxes, navboxes, amboxes, and especially
one-off templates like those used by the Signpost. However, it'll need a
concerted effort from all of us to re-write and improve all the thousands
of templates across our hundreds of wikis to make this a reality. It
requires judgement, æsthetics and expertise, and so isn't something that
can be done automatically by software. It's a big effort, but it's going to
be worth it. :-)
When I said templates here I meant skins - sorry for using confusing/outdated terminology
(back when I was last developing website skins, they were called templates!). It's
great to hear that they're being worked on - mediawiki template styles are definitely
something that need improving in the near future (hopefully along with table styles, since
they are currently horribly displayed on mobiles). I'm hoping that having a responsive
skin for the webpages isn't too far off, though?
Thanks,
Mike