doc/bugs/backlinks_onhover_thing_can_go_weird.mdwn



I was just hovering over the '...' next to the backlinks on a page on
http://ikiwiki.info/. In terms of the size of my browser window, this was
towards the bottom-right of the screen.
When I hovered over the '...', the additional backlinks float appeared. This
caused the page length to grow down, meaning a horizontal scrollbar was added
to the page. This meant the text reflowed, and the '...' moved outside of my
mouse pointer region.
This caused an infinite loop of box appears... text moves, box disappears...
box re-appears.. which was not very visually pleasant.
In general I think that the onhover float is a bit of bad UI. Even a truncated
list of backlinks looks cluttered due to there being no delimiters. I moved to
having an always-complete list of backlinks and having them as LI elements
inside a UL to make it look neater, although I appreciate that would make some
pages very long indeed.
How about doing something a little like [[plugins/toggle]] for the excess
items instead?
-- [[Jon]]