(Incidentally, is there some trick to making Wikipedia work on the Treo? The pages are readable before they finish loading, but then they blow up: most of the text vanishes, except for some gigantic-font headlines.)
Update: There are several sites that provide PDA-oriented copies of Wikipedia, and pda.en.wapedia.org seems to be the best of a bad bunch. Most of them strip out all of the images; wapedia.org tries to include the images, but screws up on half of them.
If you have a Wikipedia account, you can use one of the skins they have. The Simple skin works with my 650; it's ugly, but it works.
Up next, Wikipedia finds all the funds it could ever need from various vested political interests and pulls a Google.
Wikipedia's credibility is growing by leaps and bounds, because of things just like this. So is their database size, the clearest example of exponential growth you might find, in the English version anyway. (At present it's at 2.5 GB, so once you figure out what the deal is with their HTML you can still easily dump the whole thing to an SD card and save your battery life.)
Treating rankings as real data can only lead to tears.
It is, however, quite efficient for giving us The Fear big time. FUCK ME, WE'RE NUMBER 18 IN THE WORLD TODAY! Reach is now 3% of all web page accesses. I think the numbers would be higher if Alexa were bright enough to release a Firefox plugin.
http://wapipedia.org/
That's not bad, except that it strips out all the images.
Heh, checking my Blazer bookmarks, it turns out that I actually use wapedia.org, which keeps the piccies (and tables of contents, and etc.) It's much closer to the desktop version, only without the retarded stylesheet.
wapedia.org can't go to any articles that have an ampersand in the name, otherwise looks pretty nice
It seems wapipedia cannot find "Claire L'Heureux-Dubè"
For reading Wikipedia on my Treo 650, I usually go through http://mobile.answers.com/. They reformat the Wikipedia content as well as aggregate other information sources.
They also strip the images out of the Wikipedia articles.
I've not seen the picture stripping you mention. If you browse to http://mobile.answers.com/main/ntquery?tname=netscape&curtab=2222_1 (which is where I got from going to mobile.answers.com, searching for "netscape", then choosing the Wikipedia link), you'll see several pictures in the article.
You're right -- I guess I had clicked the "Encyclopedia" link instead of the "Wikipedia" link, since their nav bar is so long that half off it was off the screen... It seems like pda.en.wapedia.org sucks least so far.
Have you tried Opera for the Treo?
For Wikipedia on the Treo, use the PDA-formatted Wapedia
That seems not-terrible, but their formatting screws up on half of the images; compare this to that.
You can make a style-sheet for Wikipedia that makes the pages better match the screen geometry of your device like this guy did for his Nokia 770.
Maxpedia does a reasonable job of making Wikipedia pocketable. Go to 'wap.maxpedia.org' from phone/ppc/palm/treo. Seems to keep images ok, but it does split articles into multiple pages, which is a bit annoying. Probably needed for wap, though.
Or there's the Google Mobilizer that reformats any pages - I've just tried it with Wikipedia, and it works pretty well, except it splits pages up, and the search form is on the second page.
On my phone (and in Safari) wap.maxpedia.org just redirects back to their gigantic half-german ad-laden front page, and is not mobile-y at all. Worthless.
If you're feeling programmish, I've found it helpful to have a proxy running on my own machine that shortcuts to services, and also can reformat those that I/my clie's browser don't like. Plus the URLs are more likely to still be in my history, so less typing. Can do things like keep cookie management and login details on the proxy, too, so no sending them over possibly untrusted networks. /wp/SomeArticle or /ebay/itemnumber or /amazon/cd/searchterm or whatever floats your boat. Cuts down loading time as well as data costs, as you're no longer having to fetch their front page before getting the desired content.
the hatterBuying the Palm browser that doesn't suck, basically. There are a couple of pages on the subject, with screenshots: Wikipedia on PDAs; Wikipedia:Browser notes.
The WebPro that works on the Treo is actually free.
http://smartphonetools.treobits.com/cart.php?target=product&product_id=17098&category_id=255
I got it while trying to find a way to make paypal payments. (Blazer and paypal don't play nice). WebPro works well with paypal. I just checked, and it seems pretty happy with regular wikipedia, including images.
OperaLite was a giant pain in the ass to install, and since it's a generic java phone app, it's not very treoesque in its operation.
Yeah, I should change browsers on my phone because Wikipedia has fucked up their site with overenthusiastic use of CSS. Right. CSS is teh awesome!! It makes everything so much fucking better.
There is the fact the Blazer/"Web" seems awfully good at sucking.
And not in any of the good ways.
It's really dumb how hard it is to find out that "Web Pro" even exists for a Treo. In my (as of yet, limited) experience it seems to be Just Better, with the exception of not being able to auto-dial phone numbers on a page.
You could always demand a refund from Wikipedia. Alternately, the 'simple' skin may be the go.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but that kind of "helpfulness" is what gets people banned around here.
sigh.
so glad to have more evidence that we've got a gang of puerile mental midgets running the country.
Create a new wikipedia account with your desktop browser. Change the preferences to use the "nostalgia" or "chick" skin. Log into that account with your treo (you may have to change the display to "wide page mode" to get the login box to display properly, but you can change it back to optimized afterwards.
Raises the question of what is worse: spammers or politicians?
Opera Mini does a great job rendering Wikipedia. You can even edit/sign in. If your device has J2ME of course.
http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/operamini/
ps: It is great for Slashdot too