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kiwix / kiwix-js-pwa

Kiwix JS Offline Browser implemented as a Progressive Web App (PWA), and packaged as Electron, NWJS and UWP apps for Windows and Linux.
https://pwa.kiwix.org
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Provide interim MDwiki app release #651

Open Jaifroid opened 1 month ago

Jaifroid commented 1 month ago

@tim-moody: Since https://github.com/openzim/zim-requests/issues/1117 has been closed, I suggest we move discussion of this here, even though it would affect the Android packaged app too.

It seems we have three choices for releasing an updated MDwiki app:

  1. Release a new app with the last available ZIM (June), i.e. only code update, no new content. Advantage is I can do this quickly, and it keeps the app "in the public eye". The downside is that updating an app that is working fine as-is without updating the information it contains uses people's bandwidth unnecessarily for what would be only minor code updates.
  2. Prepare new ZIMs of mdwiki and mdwiki-app using the old API (on your side), and I upload these to download.kiwix.org. This assumes we have an updated medicine.tsv (https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner/issues/2069), so the content would indeed be new.
  3. Wait until you can get dev to work fully on your side and provide a ZIM release based on dev and the new API.

We're currently on number 3 above. Please note that the format changes quite a lot with the new API, but I've got code in my app that deals with the differences and allows nearly all functionality to work as before. (I've been through this already with the Wikivoyage packaged app.)

Let me know if you think we should change strategy.

tim-moody commented 1 month ago

Please note that the format changes quite a lot with the new API

can you tell me more. I need to catch up with what is planned.

Jaifroid commented 1 month ago

can you tell me more. I need to catch up with what is planned.

Not really "planned"! What happened is the new Wikipedia/Wikimedia API returns subtly (and not so subtly) different page formatting and, especially, CSS. There is no change in the ZIM format, this is only about presentation and style of the content. The Kiwix override styles are not in their final form, from what I can tell. The new format broke a number of Wikipedia-specific features in the app, and I had to work around these on a temporary basis in the reader until we have a settled final format. One such feature was switching between mobile and desktop style. Other issues involved strange positioning or styling of elements. This should now be fixed reader-side, at least with Wikivoyage, but I assume there are the same issues with Wikipedia-based ZIMs. I won't know for sure till I get one to test. But I'm presuming that if you provide your own ZIMs now for mdwiki and mdwiki-app, these will be based on the old API for now?

tim-moody commented 1 month ago

I'm not sure what 'new' and 'old' api mean, but I am working towards invoking the REST API rather than the api.php api.

Jaifroid commented 1 month ago

Yup, I'm hazy on the details, as I don't work on the scraper, but "REST API" or "mobile-html" endpoint is what it's often referred to as. The previous one was called the "mobile-sections" endpoint, and it's deprecated: https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner/issues/1664 .

Jaifroid commented 2 weeks ago

@tim-moody Any update on progress? Don't mean to hassle, it would just be useful to know how things are going!

tim-moody commented 19 minutes ago

@Jaifroid I think I now have a way forward, but I'm still working on the code. It will depend on the answers to https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner/issues/2100