Extension:Popups

The Popups extension displays "hovercards" − popups with summaries of article contents when the user hovers over an article link.

This is an initiative of the Design team, to move popular Gadgets into Beta Features. Mockups and more information available at Beta Features/Hovercards

Dependencies
This extension has a hard dependency on Extension:TextExtracts and Extension:PageImages. There is also an optional dependency on Extension:BetaFeatures (without BetaFeatures, it loads for all users) and Extension:EventLogging (for logging).

Content
The popups show an image (if one is available), a small text excerpt and the timestamp of the last edit.

Image
The image comes from the Extension:PageImages which returns the single most appropriate thumbnail associated with an article. It ignores maintenance templates, stubs, flag icons etc.

Text
The text comes from the Extension:TextExtracts from which a plain-text extract is requested. Even though two sentences are requested a limit is put through CSS that makes sure that text doesn't overflow from the card. This is done by applying a max-height on that element. This approach would provide the same visual solution regardless of the language's script. A major con is that the text stops abruptly and ellipses can't be added.