cross-posting to wikitech-l On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Jon Robson <jrob...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I've been experimenting with the api that Max Semenik has been working > on and the html5 history interface [1] to add javascript to the > MobileFrontend extension so that any searches, link to other articles > and section expansions go via the api. It's something I'm very > interested to do both from a usability and site performance > perspective. The best example of what I'm trying to do can be seen on > http://github.com . It's worth pointing out that this is not currently > on the roadmap but it is something I'm very interested in us doing. > > The resulting prototype [2] has a few quirks (and a few things I > haven't paid attention to e.g. page titles do not change) but I think > is interesting as it is noticeably faster (please bear in mind this is > a slow server) and reduces the load on the server in that any page > loads after the first load will go via the api. Note devices which do > not support the history api or jQuery are not effected by this code. > > It throws up some interesting challenges. > 1) It enables sub section expansion for which the existing design > doesn't really seem to work. Also it means pages like History of China > [3] look different when viewed normally to when retrieved via the api > (the normal version only has expansion on the top level sections) > 2) Also the back button (at the moment) has no memory of which > sections were opened/closed and instead goes back to the last loaded > page. > 3) The first page is still wastefully loaded. It would be good if we > could load all sections dynamically on the first page whilst not give > a crummy experience to non-javascript users. > 4) Some sections just contain sub sections. So if I click a section > with heading 'Section 1' that only contains 'Section 1.1' and 'Section > 1.2' there is a brief flash whilst it tries to load any text for > section 1 (Please load-> empty string). To see what I mean load the > Japan page [4], load History of China via the link 'Chinese history > texts' and click 'Prehistory' (observe 'loading content'). I guess it > would be useful if the api let me know beforehand if a section was > empty of any text so I didn't try to retrieve it. > 5) The api returns the heading in the text. For example in [5] the > line Prehistory includes the heading in the text. This is unnecessary > as I can determine this from toclevel and line. In my code I'm > currently scrubbing this out every time I load. > > Feel free to have a play [6] locally as the mobile-geo server is very > very slow and improve on it. > Let me know if this interests anyone other than me :-) > > ~Jon > > [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/history.html#the-history-interface > [2] http://mobile-geo.wmflabs.org/w/index.php/Millet > [3] http://mobile-geo.wmflabs.org/w/index.php/History_of_China > [4] http://mobile-geo.wmflabs.org/w/index.php/Japan > [5] > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=mobileview&page=History+of+China&format=jsonfm§ions=1a > [6] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#change,3894 > > _______________________________________________ > Mobile-l mailing list > mobil...@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l > -- Arthur Richards Software Engineer, Mobile [[User:Awjrichards]] IRC: awjr +1-415-839-6885 x6687 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
