That preview window has been a lifesaver. Honestly, as someone with ADD (or ADHD or whatever it's called these days), Wikipedia is a fucking minefield. I regularly have many Wikipedia articles open in sometimes ten or twenty different windows, each with anywhere from twenty to fifty tabs (I open a new window to delineate a completely new tangent, or if opening a new tab will cause the tab icons to disappear, otherwise I open a new tab in the current window -- I like tabs and make heavy use of Session Buddy and The Great Suspender). The preview window has really cut a lot of the extraneous BS out of my evening-destroying rabbit holes. I figured it was probably a difficult thing to develop, but if anyone involved with its creation passes by this lowly post, please know that you have my sincerest gratitude for making such a meaningful, useful tool.
Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
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Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#12One downside is that when I move the cursor along while reading an article all sorts of links now pop up at me. What I mean is using the mouse or trackpad to keep my place in the article; sometimes I drag the cursor to highlight the text, especially when skimming. Surely I'm not the only one who does this?
At the bottom of every popup there is a cog icon. Clicking the cog icon gives a popup where you can choose to Disable and Enable the feature.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#13One downside is that when I move the cursor along while reading an article all sorts of links now pop up at me. What I mean is using the mouse or trackpad to keep my place in the article; sometimes I drag the cursor to highlight the text, especially when skimming. Surely I'm not the only one who does this?
There should really be some "hover intent" going on if there isn't already and it just needs tweaking maybe?
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#14I had no idea what this was talking about, and it appears to be because they've defaulted it to off for existing logged-in users. Maybe that's a way of reducing pushback.
In case you want to turn it on (or off), it's under Preferences->Appearance->Page previews. I think I'll probably leave it off personally. I like the previews that have already existed for a while in the mobile app, but on desktop not so sure.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#15I am continually impressed by the markup Wikipedia generates. They've managed to pull in pretty link previews, scientific notation and a grid layout, whilst building a highly nested markup structure? The remarkable part? Wikipedia works great inside a text browser like elinks. It works great in a modern browser. Without sacrificing the interactivity people have grown to expect.
Last time I checked, their markup was pretty much nightmare fuel, but it should work fine with IE5, I'm sure :)
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#16As the major other php wiki implementor, phpwiki, I can add my input to this.
I've implemented such an ajax page preview and also a page inliner (for expanding page trees via ajax) about 10 years ago. It was major work, because you essentially send a stripped down page in xml, so it needed some architectural changes to separate the various page templates properly. In the end it needed 2 months work. phpwiki has a proper template design and its plugins cannot ever destroy a page layout or harm security.
mediawiki on the other side is horribly undesigned spaghetti code, with no proper templating and plugin integration, so it needed a few years more. It's like parsing html with regexp.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#17This thing is not exactly customizable.
I couldn't care less for the huge image in the popup layer, scrollability and extra content would be much nicer.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#18Wow. Had just read that and then saw the feature first time while browsing over a list page. Was moving my curser down the list and when ever I wanted to click a link, the above link hat popped up the layer, highjacking my click and leading me to the wrong page.
What a great way of destroying the user experience with a beautifully over-engineered feature that is utterly crap while actually trying to use the underlying page.
Thanks an awful lot for breaking the ability to use the site as I am used to and making it impossible to scan with the curser as anchor for my eyes.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#19I am continually impressed by the markup Wikipedia generates. They've managed to pull in pretty link previews, scientific notation and a grid layout, whilst building a highly nested markup structure? The remarkable part? Wikipedia works great inside a text browser like elinks. It works great in a modern browser. Without sacrificing the interactivity people have grown to expect.
Wikipedia's markup is just terrible for trying to do any sort of scraping or analysis. I once tried to write a script that pulled the latest version of macOS from the sidebar of this article[1] and I gave up because it was difficult and brittle in a way that made it nearly impossible. I'd probably have better results parsing the HTML with a regex. Likewise, I know a friend who literally had to scrap an entire project because Wikipedia made it so difficult to get the text of an article without non-word entities in it.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#20Wow. Had just read that and then saw the feature first time while browsing over a list page. Was moving my curser down the list and when ever I wanted to click a link, the above link hat popped up the layer, highjacking my click and leading me to the wrong page. What a great way of destroying the user experience with a beautifully over-engineered feature that is utterly crap while actually trying to use the underlyin…
At least you seem to be able to disable them, click the cog in the corner of the card :)