[Wikireader] Welcome new members Tabitha Roder and Håkon Lie; Wiki-to-html conversion and compres sion

[Samuel Klein]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:42 PM, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome at opera.com> wrote:
> Indeed, printing is an interest of mine. Not a whole lot will be
> printed in the future, but what is printed will come off the web, and
> it will be formatted automatically. In order for the output to look
<
>  http://www.princexml.com/samples/#wiki

The nice thing about bound pulp, for me, is that you can hand a book
off to others without making the others visit the library/bookstore.
So I'm excited about collection-level formatting and naming of
materials for offline sharing.

When you say 'automatic formatting' and I think 'automatic
context-sensitive hyperlinking'.  Hyperlinks are ways to enrich
information; not blue underlines placed there by the author.  WP style
is actually fairly explicit about where and how often to link; most
articles don't have it right, but in reformatting it's easy to apply
good style universally to get just the right density and relevance of
hyperlinks to make for a smooth uptake of information.

> I also have another hat, namely that of www.opera.com. At Opera we
> want to ensure that web content is accessible on all sorts of devices,
> connecting to the web in all sorts of ways. Sometimes the user's
> screen will be different from a standard PC screen (which is the case
> for OLPC) and reformatting may be beneficial. For this to be graceful,
> we need to ensure that the markup is sufficiently rich.

A few things that seem to matter for the problem at hand: clean
separation of image and text layers so that they can be resized
independently.  Letting every page express a default linearization of
nonlinearly laid out content.  Explicit prioritization of content in
such a way that if you can only load 5% or 5k of a page you get the
right bits first.

(You may notice that we have hacked into Browse a certain image- and
text-resizing ratio.  This can be frustrating.  A page designed to
look great in Browse doesn't usually look great in Firefox.xo )

> So, I'm interested in improving the templates of Wikipedie to ensure
> that the markup is compact, rich and reusable. My short-term goal on
> this front is to manually re-encode a wikipedia article to make it
> more compact, print-friendly, and mobile-friendly.
>
> I'm also very interested in video for the web:
>
>  http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/video/

What do you think about the new Mozilla/Wikimedia collab around video
for the web?

> And, in the OLPC
>
>  http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/olpc

Yea, these photos should not be missed.
   http://blog.abrenna.com/olpc-village-in-oslo/

SJ