“Design Graveyard § Popup Annotations”, Gwern2010-10-01 (similar)⁠:

Meta page describing Gwern.net website design experiments and post-mortem analyses.

The most technically complex & signature feature of Gwern.net are the on-hover popups & on-click popovers, which provide metadata and extensive annotations/summaries/hyperlinking. Some websites provide limited popup functionality, like Wikipedia, but are missing entire swathes of functionality.

This is because good popups are hard both to design and implement. The Gwern.net annotation system didn’t spring into being overnight fully-formed; indeed, depending on how you count, the March 2023 system is no less than the 7th popup system we have implemented. (The jokes “time is a flat circle” and “all this has happened before, and will happen again” were made repeatedly during development.)

But at that point, we have a fast, flexible, debugged, good-looking system which we see no major flaws in, and future work will be focused on the content which goes into popups (such as by using machine learning to automatically write summaries)

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