I’d like to revive some interest in improving support for mobile browsers.
Extremely limited WAP-based browsers are at least sort of served by the experimental WAP gateway, but there are a lot of smartphones and other handheld devices that get on the “real” web with greater or lesser degrees of success, and I’d like to see us improve the default look & feel of MediaWiki on them.
At the moment I think we can roughly divide the mobile browsers into two categories:
- Those that render much like a full desktop browser and let you zoom as necessary (iPhone/Mobile Safari, Opera Mini, …?)
- Those that have very limited CSS and JavaScript or strip a lot of stuff down (Opera Mini in “mobile view” mode, most others?)
At the moment, all I’ve got access to are an iPhone and the Opera Mini simulator applet, so that’s what I’ll be putting the occasional bit of time into. These already pretty much “just work”, but the UI can be very awkward due to the desktop-size layout; I’d like a cleaner handheld stylesheet that lets most pages be legible when you get to them.
If you’ve got another device and you’d like to help testing and developing for it, please stake your claim.
Alternatively if you’ve got a spare device you can donate to us, that’d be great too! (Especially if it doesn’t need a service subscription to get on the net…)
The development of mobile-specific stylesheets for MediaWiki strikes me as a major product. I’d prefer the simpler approach of just being fed the print version when my BlackBerry is detected. I don’t visit the site on my mobile to edit, just to get the information I need.
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Well, the print version is itself a stylesheet. :)
The two wordpress plugins that are available do a magnificient job on both fronts, management and readability. iwphone and wphone plugins have show what is possible. i would love to see how a mediawiki implementation can work. i think the user should not have to point to a different url, but rather have the BB or iphone detected.
I just found this from google.
I have been using mediawiki at home and for work, love it, and because I love it I want to be able to have access to my own wiki wherever I go.
Anyway, I have a Nokia E51 to use access my mediawiki at home through the g3 network.
Only using different stylesheets is in not enough since cell network bandwith is very very expensive. If there would be any way to strip alot of the unnecisery formating from being transfered to the device then it would be simply awsome :)
Looking very forward to this :D
Google brought me here… I was looking for an iPhone app to access my own Mediawiki-based TeleWiki. Seems there’s nothing around yet… I guess developing an iphone-friendly skin is another way to reach the ultimate goal of browsing Mediawiki-sites on my iPhone. Anyone found a solution yet??
I also was brought here from Google. I would love to help develope the CSS for an MediaWiki on the iPhone. I found a TiddlyWiki theme (itw.bidix.info) which I feel would be a good start. Its simple and minimalistic but fast. I have CSS and xHTML background but i am new to PHP and MediaWiki but I am willing to learn.