Forwarding to a wider audience. Quick summary: Do people still care about having to add additional markup to their homepage to make it mobile friendly? Are you interesting in seeing how it looks without the special casing and fixing it?
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com Date: Wed, May 15, 2013 at 5:24 PM Subject: Special casing the Main Page - Reigniting an old discussion To: mobile-l mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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_homepag... [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&retur...
-- Jon Robson http://jonrobson.me.uk @rakugojon