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Any trick to read large Wikipedia "Comparison of..." tables? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I really like comparison tables on wikipedia but find them hard to navigate.

For example: Comparison of web browsers > General Information

Say I want a web browser for Linux which has been recently updated. I can sort by the "Platform" column, or by "Latest release: Date" but not both.

Sometimes tables can be very wide and/or very tall. Once you get to scrolling it is impossible to see either the row or column headings. So then you can't tell where you even are in the table. Example: Table of AMD processors Also they can have complex structures with merged headings and content.

Ideally I would like to apply some basic spreadsheet-type operations like hiding rows/columns, filtering, sorting by multiple columns etc. Even if there was a way to easily get the table into an actual spreadsheet that would be helpful. I tried some extensions that export tables to other formats but nothing worked without a lot of cleanup.

Is there some kind of trick or tool or extension that makes these ginormous tables useful? I can't tell how people even add information to these things, they are so large.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've seen websites where if you scroll down a table and cut off the heading, the heading detaches and follows your view so you can always see it. Why can't Wikipedia do that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Could be using CSS position: fixed. But idk there could be other more sophisticated ways to accomplish the same thing.

In terms of why to not use it, I can think of reasons to avoid it by default. Like it could be very annoying on some devices in some situations. If the page authors made the table headings really long, it could obscure the content. I know I have been annoyed by this sort of thing when websites use position: fixed for their navigation or other elements. When I've snooped around the backend of wikipedia I see that they are contending with a wide variety of contributors and users and whatever they do needs to accommodate everyone.

What I find surprising is that there is (apparently) no 3rd party browser extension, userstyle or userscript that allows enabling this.