Online Wikipedia with the iLiad internal html viewer

[Michele L.M.]

Hello,

If offline wikipedia or alternative browsers (e.g. dillo) are not an option for you, then you might be interested in this post.

Basically, I made a script which fires the internal html viewer in order to fetch and render the wikipedia pages you are interested in. You can see the application in action in the screenshots below and give it a try.

Instructions:

1. Untar the app in your preferred location. A folder wikipedia_viewer will be created
2. Navigate into this folder (images 1 and 2)
3. Tag the Click_to_create_the_link_for_the_page item with the entry you are looking for (first row of the description). Refer to this post if you don't know what I am talking about
4. Click on the just-tagged Click_to_create_the_link_for_the_page (image 3). An html page named after your entry will be created (image 4)
5. Click on this newly created entry and don't stop breathing (otherwise you will feel faint waiting for the rendering )

I know. This is not very linear but I can try to work on it if needed.

Some caveats: (too many at least for now)

• The internal viewer is pretty slow to render. If you get a blank page after clicking on the html file, don't be impatience. You might have to wait up to 1m for big pages. Sorry, it' not up to me
• Links don't seem to work. You get your page and read it. Period. Maybe this is fixable but I haven't had time to investigate
• Be aware that wikipedia urls are for the most part case-sensitive. This implies that you have to enter ILiad and not iLiad (but you can enter either italy or Italy). I have some ideas on how to fix this (at a later stage)
• The html files you see in the content lister do not have the actual content of the page. They are just used to start the web browser and redirect to the wikipedia site. It would be nice to cache the content once you see the page. In this way you would be able to return on the page in offline-mode

Please feel free to suggest improvements and report bugs.

Michele
--