Reevaluate inflection information styling

[tomashaddad]

I just saw @seth-js's PR #561 and thought this should be made into an issue since I raised the same concerns two days ago on TMW Discord.

I agree that the new styling takes up too much space. I think placing all of this information next to the headword looks fine:

.headword-list-details { display: inline-block; }
.inflection-rule-chain { display: inline-block; }

But this styling collapses if there's too many inflection rules or the popup size is too small. It probably wouldn't look good for languages with a long list of inflections either:

Seth's forks actually hide this information by default to save space:

It might be my own personal preference towards more compact layouts, but I think the loss of vertical space pushing down the definitions (the main purpose of this extension) is a design issue. I understand the sentiment of leaving it to custom CSS, but I'm assuming the vast majority of users don't want to touch anything related to code, and want these sorts of things to either be the default or an option they can set.

[seth-js]

I would love to remake the inflection box feature for Yomitan, but I have no clue how to make it a togglable option. Let me know if you'd like something like that.

[seth-js]

Here's a mock-up. I changed the Algorithm icon to the letter A. I can also make it so that inflection icons are hidden, but appear when you hover over the inflection.

@toasted-nutbread @StefanVukovic99

How does this look?

[StefanVukovic99]

Looks ok, I like that it shows the original text before deinflection. However, I intentionally skipped that box when i was first integrating @seth-js's changes as i estimated it wasn't worth it.

• If the box is kept open (and i think users who are still learning the grammar would have it open), it takes up even more space then before.
• Hover control may not be good for all use cases, touchscreen etc. Would require even more settings
• Adding settings should be worth its cost.
• I don't think I've ever seen a term with multiple headwords, but that is a currently existing option, and this would have to be compatible.
• TermHeadword has TermSource[], not sure how this would handle multiple sources.
• Popup UI improvements #508 might render this moot

[seth-js]

In that case, I'll wait untilPopup UI improvements is finished before thinking about changing the inflection style again.

[toasted-nutbread]

Keep in mind that hover does not exist on touch screens, and a conditionally visible element like this is probably better suited for some sort of popup that is not inline in the document flow.

I've also thought about this a few times and a few times I've wished that more information could be shown on the inflections; not by default, but by clicking on it to get more details or something. Basically, an option to allow the user to see every step of the deinflection process. I think this would also help debugging a lot of cases as the inflection logic becomes more broad and/or complex.