Forum:Replacing ReferenceTooltips with ReferencePopups


 * Copied over from The Sims Wiki talk:Development Portal

For some time now we've been using ReferenceTooltips, which allow readers to view footnotes by simply moving the cursor over the reference, instead of having to click it and be transported to the bottom of the page, away from the text they were viewing.

ReferenceTooltips has been broken in Oasis for a long time, and it's unlikely it will ever be fixed now. The thing has never loaded in Oasis, and I personally use navigation popups to view footnotes. However, not everyone has, or wants to use, navigation popups. Even in my experience, the script has been buggy even in the Monobook skin, and I'd like to retire it in favor of an updated version.

I suggest that we scrap ReferenceTooltips and use ReferencePopups instead.

ReferencePopups is basically a Wikia-version of the popups found on Wikipedia. Like ReferenceTooltips, it will display the footnote text simply by moving the cursor over the reference, and allows the reader to read footnotes without having to jump away from the article text. The one big difference is that this tool offers more features, works in both Oasis and Monobook, and auto-conforms to the settings in theme designer, so we don't need to go tinkering about to make the tool work. Individual users can also configure the script for themselves, all without the need of messing with their JS files. They can disable the tool for themselves if they wish, and re-enable them at any time.

The script seems to have a few quirks though. For one, the "Configure Reference Popups" link, that allows users to re-enable popups if they disabled them, doesn't appear in most namespaces in Oasis, though it does appear in Monobook for whatever reason. This might be solvable by "locking down" the script, as described here. Alternatively we can always just hope people will be able to go to a namespace where the link does appear (it appears in the Project namespace where there are categories) or just hope they know how to switch to Monobook, where the link always appears with no trouble. However, these issues are nothing compared to the brokeness that ReferenceTooltips is now.

You can try out the script for yourself by adding the following to Special:MyPage/common.js:

importArticle({type:'script', article:'w:c:dev:ReferencePopups/code.js'});

Thoughts? --I am  k6ka  Talk to me!   See what I have done  12:22, May 31, 2015 (UTC)