> Wikipedia’s use of it is surprising to our present day audience, and it may decrease the perceived strength of domain branding
Really? That’s the reasoning, and not the fact that mobile links forwarded to desktop browsers would render the mobile view?!
If you read the more technical internal rationals instead of just the press release, what you said is mentioned as one of the reasons for the change
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Mobile_d...
With m., they used to see a mobile layout that’s a really poor fit for a desktop screen and that they would have manually switch out of via some relatively obscure button.
Of course it is, they just need to drop the pretense that English is not the default.
A random "link to highlight" example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_I_of_Cyprus#:~:text=On%2...
Such a link doesn't work on mobile if it points inside a collapsed section.
That makes directing people to relevant content on mobile really hard, and I end up sending screenshots instead.
EDIT: "Link to fragment"s had the same problem, but apparently, they fixed it. Thanks for that too!
mobile website did not redirect pc users
10 years late at fixing this very basic problem
they didn't jump on the shifting trends immediately, got to it eventually when it was the clear path, and implemented it in a completely reasonable way... they may have actually benefited quite a bit for directions to settle
...no? A LOT no?
one-way pc/mobile redirect is not reasonable, whatsoever
(Well, the mobile view is useful. Not sure whether splitting it off into its own domain is useful.)
Guess this also means I’m getting old as I remember the earlier comics about his partner going through this. I think this is the first one I read after I became a “weekly reader”: https://xkcd.com/1141.
I sort of remember some of the older MediaWiki desktop themes looking worse than the mobile theme, but it was never enough for me personally to try always using the mobile site at the time. I do still strongly prefer old.reddit.com... For as long as that portal continues to exist.
IMO this isn't a good reason. Developers can change the user agent.
(I also imagine there could be a no-redirect preference for logged in users. Or even just a special query string you could add to the end of a url.)
Your website might want to present a different interface for people using mouse and keyboard than for people using tiny touch screens? Even if the number of pixels in the browser window is otherwise the same.
Wikipedia was one of the worst offenders, but lots of sites screwed this up in exactly the same way, and I feel it was a predecessor to modern "mobile first" web platforms that either treat desktop as second-class users or actively don't want desktop users.
Like the subdomain was RIGHT THERE.
That is not at all the reason; did you read the article?.
Also web developers can just use devtools to simulate a mobile browser.
Users probably especially want to deep link to #headings on mobile devices
BTW found this writeup on the Wikipedia CDN: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/CDN
janpio•2mo ago
I was hoping this was a unification of the both layouts as well, that would have been really impressive. The mobile version of the article pages is great, but getting both versions from the same frontend would be an amazing case study.
bawolff•2mo ago
That said, there is a "desktop" version of the mobile skin, you can get it by appending ?useskin=minerva to a wikipedia url.
Akronymus•2mo ago
bawolff•2mo ago
NooneAtAll3•2mo ago
isn't "new" pc design that's been around for last couple years pretty much mobile one already? (and thus ugly af)
bawolff•2mo ago