Topic on Talk:Page Previews/Flow

IMHO, a much-needed improvement to the Page Preview feature would be to have it end at a complete sentence instead of at an arbitrary word limit. Here's an example for the entry Uffizi :

The Uffizi Gallery is a prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy. One of the most important Italian museums and the most visited, it is also one of the largest and best known in the world and holds a collection of priceless

This preview text would be so much better if it included the full sentence, like so:

The Uffizi Gallery is a prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy. One of the most important Italian museums and the most visited, it is also one of the largest and best known in the world and holds a collection of priceless works, particularly from the period of the Italian Renaissance.

Could you please pass on this suggestion to the developers? Thanks.

That sounds like a nice idea when you assume that you will be gaining the end of the sentence. However in reality there's going to be a maximum preview text length, which essentially changes this into a proposal to drop the first half of any sentence that would be incomplete. When viewed that way, displaying the partial sentence is almost surely preferable to not displaying it.

Thanks for the reply. I agree with your assessment of the issue, and I had thought about it too. The reason I still believe it's an issue though is because I observed that a large part of the time, the incomplete sentence actually caused me to open the link in a new tab to see what the next word was, thus defeating the very purpose of the preview. If many other users have also experienced this same behaviour, it might be worth fixing it.

To explain better, considering the example provided in my original comment, the preview ends with "holds a collection of priceless", which immediately begs the question: priceless what? Whereas, using the rule of only including complete sentences but not crossing the word limit, the preview would reduce to:

The Uffizi Gallery is a prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy.

IMHO, this brief extract fully serves the function of a link preview, without the added "discomfort" of having a broken sentence. An ideal compromise might be to add a setting to "Include full sentences only" in the page preview preferences, but I'm guessing this might unnecessarily complicate matters.

Essentially, I suppose it boils down to seeing which option more users prefer: a shorter but complete paragraph, or a longer but broken one?

Completely agree. I've been using the link preview gadget for years, and I don't recall this being an issue there.

With this new implementation we get cut off in the middle of the sentence, with the text just fading out. The reaction is to try and scroll or to try and find the 'expand' link that will complete the sentence - basically to try and get the rest of the sentence to appear. As per previous poster, this kind of defeats the point of the preview, if you need to click through to finish the sentence.

I really appreciate the design work that has gone into this, but it nevertheless feels like a step backwards, due to this issue. Looks pretty, works less well.

Please take a look at what the previous gadget did, because that worked well.