Wikipedia on handheld devices

[David Cantrell]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 01:56:03AM +0100, Smylers wrote:
> David Cantrell writes:
> > This was prompted by Wikipedia being impossible to use on my Treo
> > because the page layout assumes you have a large screen.
> Hmmm, the HTML source of Wikipedia pages seems to include:
>   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld"
>   href="/skins-1.5/monobook/handheld.css?80" />
> So if your Treo is correctly identifying itself as a handheld device
> then it should get that version rather than the one for full-sized
> screens.

If it does, then the stylesheet is broken, cos it's unusable.

> > I'm also finding it useful on a desktop because, without all the
> > images and the complex page layout, pages load faster.
> Looking at, say:
>   http://wikiproxy.cantrell.org.uk/?.=Richard+Thompson
> It seems quite similar to the effect you get merely by going to the
> Wikipedia page then in Firefox choosing [some menus]

But I'm not running Firefox on my phone.  Nor does any normal person.
And normal people running Firefox have *no idea* what a stylesheet is in
any case.

> That link explicitly says to preview MySkin on that page (but not on
> pages it links to).

So not very useful really!

>                      To use MySkin on all pages without specifying it in
> the URL, select it in 'my preferences' > 'Skin'.

Love to, except that the string "my preferences" doesn't appear anywhere
on Wikipedia's pages until after you've logged in, which is too hard to
do even if you know that doing so is useful.

And if this was widely known, I would have thought that google would at
least have been able to point me at it.

> You can then customize MySkin to remove any more stuff you don't want.
> Create a subpage of your user page called myskin.css, for example:
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DrHyde/myskin.css

Again impractical for normal people.

Also, remember that removing cruft with a stylesheet still downloads the
cruft, it just doesn't display it.

-- 
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

    Deck of Cards: $1.29.
    "101 Solitaire Variations" book: $6.59.
    Cheap replacement for the one thing Windows is good at: priceless
        -- Shane Lazarus