Hovercards/Review

This page provides an overview of other websites that have features that features where hovering over something provides you with extra information about it.

Hearthstone Gamepedia
Overview:
 * Hearthstone is a card game, very similar in a lot of ways to Magic: The Gathering.
 * Hearthstone Gamepedia is a MediaWiki-based wiki that contains information on all of the cards in the game, and also factual information about other game-related topics, such as the mechanics of the game.
 * Whenever you hover over a link from a mainspace article to the page of a card, a full-sized picture of that card is displayed.
 * The picture of the card contains information such as its mana cost, its effects, and the health and damage of the card (i.e. an overview of the essential attributes of the card).
 * Clicking on the link then takes you to the card's page, which contains additional information of strategy, and counters for the card.

Key points:
 * Cards serve much the same purpose as Hovercards: a brief overview of the topic in question.
 * Cards have a preference for opening upwards, unless there's not enough space.
 * Cards only contain the full-sized picture of the card and no text, however a Hearthstone card always contain text that describes the behaviour of the card, so a text snippet is implicitly included in image form.
 * Cards contain no actions.
 * Cards are roughly the same size as ours.
 * Cards float around and follow your cursor: this behaviour makes it impossible to click on a card, but also makes it impossible for a card to block you from clicking on something underneath it.
 * Cards only display in a strictly defined domain: links to a Hearthstone card from a mainspace page. For example, their cards don't display if you're hovering over links in a category.

Facebook Profiles
Overview:
 * When viewing a user's profile on Facebook, and you hover over a link to someone's timeline or profile, a card is presented to you.
 * The card summarises a user; it shows their profile picture, their timeline picture, their number of followers and friends, and their current job and primary network.
 * Cards include actions:
 * Friends, which includes the option to unfriend and also many other options such as report.
 * Following, which gives you the option to unfollow the person.
 * Message, which lets you send a message to a person.

Key points:
 * Cards serve much the same purpose as Hovercards: a brief overview of the topic in question.
 * Cards have a preference for opening upwards, unless there's not enough space.
 * Cards contain the number of friends a person had, probably so that you feel "inferior" to your friends if you have less friends than they do, encouraging you to friend more people and spend more time on the site ($$$).
 * Cards include actions, but the "Friends" menu is a bit ill-defined and was probably pulled from another part of the interface.
 * Cards are roughly the same size as ours.
 * Cards stick based on link location, not cursor location. There's often enough space to see what's immediately above the card, but the code prevents you from clicking on it even if you can see it unless you mouse away.
 * Card's domain is somewhat less well defined, and results in them being less slick than the Hearthstone one because more use cases have to be accounted for.

WoWDB
Overview:
 * WoWDB is a database of World of Warcraft related topics.
 * Any in-game object, whether it be a spell, a character, a character class, or anything else, has a database entry. Items are in a category. A category may have a single parent class, and multiple child classes. The site uses breadcrumbs for navigation.
 * Whenever you hover over any item, a tooltip similar to the tooltip that is displayed in game is displayed.

Key points:
 * Cards serve much the same purpose as Hovercards: a brief overview of the topic in question.
 * Cards have a preference for opening upwards, unless there's not enough space.
 * Cards look similar to the in-game tooltip, which is information that the user of the DB is used to parsing already.
 * Cards contain no actions.
 * Cards are on average smaller than ours, due to mimicking the in-game tooltip.
 * Cards float around and follow your cursor; this behaviour makes it impossible to click on a card, but also makes it impossible for a card to block you from clicking on something underneath it.
 * Cards only display in a strictly defined domain: links to an object. However, the website itself has that strictly defined domain, so they essentially function on almost all links.