Mobile Wiki Portal?

[diamondsw]

Wikipedia recently opened an excellent mobile portal at http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ (alternatively, you can open any page with your user agent set to a mobile browser, like Safari for the iPhone). Aside from simplified formatting, a key difference is the body text width can be much narrower than the usual, which keeps text large and readable on a 320px-wide screen.

Seeing as baka-tsuki is based on the same wiki foundation as Wikipedia, is there any chance that the code changes they made there could be brought over here? I would *love* to be able to read these translations on my phone, wherever and whenever.

Thanks!

[onizuka-gto]

Mmmm.....to be honest I don't think this will be a possibility, partly because its a very recent thing. We might do it in the future but nothing we can gurantee.

However I think an app will probably be made for the iphone to see wiki-format sites a tad easier.

I more or less read Baka-Tsuki on my httc google phone with ease (like now for instance), mainly using a wikipage app. Which reformats the page to suit my screen.

Plus I think the newer phones will be able to provide the full internet experience without compromising are just around the corner.

[diamondsw]

Mmmm.....to be honest I don't think this will be a possibility, partly because its a very recent thing. We might do it in the future but nothing we can guarantee.

That's cool - just wanted to plant the seed.

However I think an app will probably be made for the iphone to see wiki-format sites a tad easier.

I more or less read Baka-Tsuki on my httc google phone with ease (like now for instance), mainly using a wikipage app. Which reformats the page to suit my screen.

There are a couple dozen wiki apps for the iPhone - and every one is for Wikipedia only. Grrr....

Plus I think the newer phones will be able to provide the full internet experience without compromising are just around the corner.

Well, this isn't about not getting the full rendering experience - we're getting that today, but the site isn't designed for a small screen. Take your desktop web browser and make it 320 pixels wide - the site's not going to be readable. The only way a phone is going to be able to read it is by either ignoring the HTML and manually reformatting it (what these apps do) or by having a style sheet served up that works better on a small screen like a phone (which is what the new wikipedia mobile site does). The way that Mobile Safari (and presumably Opera Mobile) render is completely correct - and fairly unusable on such a small screen.

[Const2k]

There's absolutely no problems with wiki as it is now under Opera Mobile.

Desktop browser emulation - Using built-in "Fit to Screen" - What you need for not so user-friendly browsers - Printable "Desktop" version - Printable "Fit to Screen" Version



Note that you don't need to use "Printable version" link in Opera Mobile, simply use (default AFAIR) "Fit to Screen" mode.

[diamondsw]

Note that you don't need to use "Printable version" link in Opera Mobile, simply use (default AFAIR) "Fit to Screen" mode.

Yes, but that is a hack for sites that are poorly laid out to begin with, and anything but standard. It's deliberately breaking how the site instructs it to be rendered. You're now at the mercy of each browser developer to a) implement this, and b) do a decent job (try loading this at all on a PalmOS device which has a feature to "fix" the layout - you get a one-character-wide strip all the way down). Just out of curiosity, how does it load in IE, the browser that came with your device? How does it load on Android, which also uses WebKit? Mobile Firefox when that finally matures? What's going to happen when you get your next phone? Etc.

Even if you say to just use Opera Mobile (which is lagging badly on recent web standards, BTW), even that is not consistently available on all platforms, and further bifurcated into "Opera Mobile" and "Opera Mini" with different feature sets and rendering.

You can either rely on browser-specific hacks like this, or add a method of laying it out acceptably for a mobile device. Since the wiki data in the backend isn't HTML and such, the Wikimedia platform is uniquely able to provide multiple views, whether this is standard vs print view, or standard vs mobile.

Mind you, all of this is NOT to say "go do this for the grubby demanding user". It's just to point out why it's important, perhaps, at some point.