On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 4:29 PM, Niklas Laxström
<niklas.laxstrom(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2016-04-05 8:51 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson
<jrobson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
Special:Translate doesn't work [1] and the
current plan is to make it
redirect to desktop which is disappointing and I'd guess loses us lots of
potential editors (myself included).
When we developed the new interface for Special:Translate (aka TUX) we
did some testing that it works on tablets. Is there way to mark it
suitable for tablets alone because we have not designed it for smart
phones?
It depends on what libraries it uses and whether those are mobile
friendly. Best thing to do is create a Phabricator task and tag
"reading web" and we can start exploring that. Definitely happy to
help (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T102922#1466929).
Personally, I'd love the reading web team to collaborate with the
languages team more - maybe that's something we can try to convince
the powers that be to set aside time for as a future quarterly goal.
And what can we do for the rest? Let them too access TUX acknowledging
it will be heavy and clunky? Would it make sense to generate minimal
non-JavaScript version for all the rest using which they can get the
job done if they are desperate but without all the advanced features
of the regular TUX UI?
Or in short, I am wondering whether "mobile support" is all or
nothing, or whether there is some middle way where we can have some
quick wins if the alternative is to have no support at all?
All good questions and I'm not sure of the answer. Amir did a super
interesting hack using Whatsapp and translate wiki at the hackathon in
Jerusalem. If porting the existing translate interface to mobile
proves too cumbersome we might want to explore and test some small
lightweight translating tools.
I'm happy to have a 1-on-1 on you or brainstorm some ideas on a wiki
page or spending some time hacking on something with you from the
mobile angle... whatever makes sense.
To take a more concrete example of impact on
mobile - we've made the mobile
skin play nicely with language interwiki links (we've even dedicated this
entire quarter to improving language switching on mobile web [2] ). On the
other hand, the languages tag does not work the same way as an interwiki
link. It does it's own thing which is sadly suffering from usability issues
on mobile [3].
This is technical debt. After over a year long push on Content
Translation, the Language team is now dedicating some time to address
high priority bugs in Translate and Universal Language Selector.
Awesome! Let me know how I can support you with this.
There
is some related work happening such as the "compact interlanguage
links out of beta" and a soon 2 year old patch in Translate to improve
the display of the language list [1]. It would be useful to look at
the big picture here but there likely isn't enough time beyond fixing
the most obvious for now.
[1]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/149585/
I hope my views on this are a little clearer to
you now and apologies for
putting you on the defensive if I did.
Thanks for the explanation, because it was not obvious to me what are
the pain points from your point of view. For the usability issues you
listed, they do affect desktop users as well, but I do appreciate that
they are more severe on mobile. For performance, is that only about
the unsuitable output from <languages> tag or is there more to it?
Yup the performance angle is secondary but that's pretty much it. I'm
also concerned about future performance issues with having to load
additional JS code to support it.
I'd love to see our new language switcher
compatible with the output of the
translate tag and the translation mechanisms available on mobile phones, so
readers can view translations and edit seamlessly around our projects.
This is helpful and I will consider it when prioritizing work. I am
not well aware of your current priorities [2], but if you think this
is important, would you consider helping us on this issue?
Of course. It would be interesting to explore if there's ways we can
link the new language overlay with content translation. I'm fairly
confident that there are people that would be willing to translate
content on mobile!
[2] I am having hard time navigating through outdated pages on
mediawiki.org. Is this the place to look:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects ?
Yup
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web
-Niklas
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