5 ms·

> Popups are positioned away from the link and do not cover up the original link, which can be clicked on like normal. (You can also click on the obvious thing

> Popups are positioned away from the link and do not cover up the original link, which can be clicked on like normal. (You can also click on the obvious thing in the popup, the title, which is a hyperlink to the original.) This was absolutely not the case, at least on my viewport size. FWIW, I also didn't realize about clicking on "the obvious thing in the popup", possibly because this is never a thing that you click on in websites. > The scroll thing is definitely bad, but fixing it is a little difficult. What's the motivation for this being a hover effect? Seems like clicking on the link to open it is a pretty well-tested paradigm. [append] One big difference between what I saw on your site and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia's are only previews and (AFAICT) feature no internal interactions.

gwern 6y ago
If your viewport is so small that there's nowhere to position the popup without overlapping, there's not much that can be done... But I think in those cases, it's supposed to be switching to popins, so if you're still getting popups, that may be a bug. You'll need to be more specific with dimensions and screenshots. (Alternately, you may be doing something weird which is not our fault. At this point, I can't rule that out since we've fixed most of the common bugs. A recent example: one person was complaining about how many clicks it took on his laptop... we were baffled how popups could require 3 clicks to open a link when it is carefully designed to let you click once as normal; and it turned out he failed to mention he was actually in mobile popin mode, because his browser reported no pointing devices, because when he unplugged and plugged back in his mouse during a desktop session, his Chrome somehow fails to register the replug and continues to claim to the CSS media-queries that he had no pointer device even as he's busy clicking on links! A bizarre scenario I would never have thought of, but true.) > FWIW, I also didn't realize about clicking on "the obvious thing in the popup", possibly because this is never a thing that you click on in websites. It totally is. Titles/headlines and section headings are self-hyperlinked all the time on the Internet (including WP), it's standard, and the links are further bolded, then underlined and get link icons in case that wasn't clear (just like all the other links on gwern.net). > What's the motivation for this being a hover effect? Seems like clicking on the link to open it is a pretty well-tested paradigm. Reduces friction, of course. How do you know if you want to see the whole thing? Every additional step or bit of friction greatly cuts down on use. It's the 1% law of UI. I'd make it eyetracking gaze-based if only I could... > One big difference between what I saw on your site and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia's are only previews and (AFAICT) feature no internal interactions. Yes, the logged-out WP previews are terrible. I'm glad we've been able to improve on them with internal links & recursive popups, although it took a ridiculous amount of work to get them right. (I still haven't figured out why they went for such limited hobbled previews, when the feature was modeled off Lupin's popups going all the way back to like 2004, which offered so much more and are invaluable to any WP editor. Like... why deliberately erase all of the links in the text? They aren't even available as an API option for that feature!)
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  Honestly, I followed shp0ngle's advice and disabled the popup behavior, which makes your site much more bearable to me. > You'll need to be more specific with dimensions and screenshots. My browser is Safari on Mac OS, using no external hardware. My viewport is 1059 x 751, as reported by window.innerWidth/innerHeight. Here is a 1-minute video which demonstrates by experience with the popups. https://seafile.cloud.cgamesplay.com/f/bd439c7761ec408c8f8a/ https://seafile.cloud.cgamesplay.com/f/bd439c7761ec408c8f8a/ Anything else I could say would be purely subjective, and it's your website so you can do with it whatever you like. You've heard my feedback; thanks for being receptive to it.
  - gwern 6y ago
    Thanks for the details and video. That confirms what I thought playing around earlier: turns out, we don't have a max/min-height set, and so it's possible to have popups on screens where it's impossible for the popup to not overlap. (For some reason, the positioning is also almost as bad as possible when the popup must overlap, but that is a secondary issue.) I think this can be easily fixed by adding a minimum height to the media-queries and falling back to popins... Obormot might want to do something different, so we'll see. But shouldn't be hard either way.

gwern 6y ago

If your viewport is so small that there's nowhere to position the popup without overlapping, there's not much that can be done... But I think in those cases, it's supposed to be switching to popins, so if you're still getting popups, that may be a bug. You'll need to be more specific with dimensions and screenshots. (Alternately, you may be doing something weird which is not our fault. At this point, I can't rule that out since we've fixed most of the common bugs. A recent example: one person was complaining about how many clicks it took on his laptop... we were baffled how popups could require 3 clicks to open a link when it is carefully designed to let you click once as normal; and it turned out he failed to mention he was actually in mobile popin mode, because his browser reported no pointing devices, because when he unplugged and plugged back in his mouse during a desktop session, his Chrome somehow fails to register the replug and continues to claim to the CSS media-queries that he had no pointer device even as he's busy clicking on links! A bizarre scenario I would never have thought of, but true.) > FWIW, I also didn't realize about clicking on "the obvious thing in the popup", possibly because this is never a thing that you click on in websites. It totally is. Titles/headlines and section headings are self-hyperlinked all the time on the Internet (including WP), it's standard, and the links are further bolded, then underlined and get link icons in case that wasn't clear (just like all the other links on gwern.net). > What's the motivation for this being a hover effect? Seems like clicking on the link to open it is a pretty well-tested paradigm. Reduces friction, of course. How do you know if you want to see the whole thing? Every additional step or bit of friction greatly cuts down on use. It's the 1% law of UI. I'd make it eyetracking gaze-based if only I could... > One big difference between what I saw on your site and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia's are only previews and (AFAICT) feature no internal interactions. Yes, the logged-out WP previews are terrible. I'm glad we've been able to improve on them with internal links & recursive popups, although it took a ridiculous amount of work to get them right. (I still haven't figured out why they went for such limited hobbled previews, when the feature was modeled off Lupin's popups going all the way back to like 2004, which offered so much more and are invaluable to any WP editor. Like... why deliberately erase all of the links in the text? They aren't even available as an API option for that feature!)

CGamesPlay 6y ago
Honestly, I followed shp0ngle's advice and disabled the popup behavior, which makes your site much more bearable to me. > You'll need to be more specific with dimensions and screenshots. My browser is Safari on Mac OS, using no external hardware. My viewport is 1059 x 751, as reported by window.innerWidth/innerHeight. Here is a 1-minute video which demonstrates by experience with the popups. https://seafile.cloud.cgamesplay.com/f/bd439c7761ec408c8f8a/ https://seafile.cloud.cgamesplay.com/f/bd439c7761ec408c8f8a/ Anything else I could say would be purely subjective, and it's your website so you can do with it whatever you like. You've heard my feedback; thanks for being receptive to it.
- gwern 6y ago
  Thanks for the details and video. That confirms what I thought playing around earlier: turns out, we don't have a max/min-height set, and so it's possible to have popups on screens where it's impossible for the popup to not overlap. (For some reason, the positioning is also almost as bad as possible when the popup must overlap, but that is a secondary issue.) I think this can be easily fixed by adding a minimum height to the media-queries and falling back to popins... Obormot might want to do something different, so we'll see. But shouldn't be hard either way.