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[meta] WHATWG CSS makes the spec much less usable #222

Open tabatkins opened 2 years ago

tabatkins commented 2 years ago

Previous webidl was using the Bikeshed default CSS, which, among other things, put the ToC in a persistent left-hand column when the page was wide enough (which it almost always was on desktop screens) and made it accessible via a fixed-position button otherwise. This was incredibly useful for WebIDL in particular, as it's an especially "random-access" spec; typical usage requires bouncing back and forth between headings as you chase a concept down.

Switching to WHATWG styles has meant a severe regression in this aspect - now the ToC lives at the top of the document only. Moving to another heading requires flinging the document all the way back to the top; this is annoying enough to desktop, but incredibly annoying on mobile.

It also appears to have lost the table styling that centered tables smaller than the visible area, and put a scrollbar on tables larger than it. This is less attractive on desktop, as the tables are now left-aligned, but makes mobile viewing more annoying, as there's now a substantial gutter on the right side that can be easily scrolled into accidentally.

Finally, the loss of darkmode styling is quite unfortunate. I already hate viewing specs on /TR because darkmode isn't allowed there quite yet; losing it on Web IDL makes me sad.

(This might belong better on /meta, given https://github.com/whatwg/meta/issues/117)

annevk commented 2 years ago

Moving this as we want all our standards to appear the same, so if we decide to fix this for Web IDL it ought to work for HTML and such as well. (Although HTML might be tricky as it has a somewhat specific setup still.)

domenic commented 2 years ago

I'm very supportive of someone doing the work here to improve these things and would love to help review. However, in Matrix Tab mentioned "just the Bikeshed stylesheet but with WHATWG green". I couldn't tell if that was a joke or serious, but in case it's serious, I'd like to not do that; we have a pretty distinct identity (and, in some cases, features) that I think we should preserve.

So what's really required here is someone with a modicum of design/CSS skills actually making the evolutionary changes to the CSS (and maybe the HTML, if necessary) to improve things, via PRs to https://github.com/whatwg/whatwg.org/tree/main/resources.whatwg.org.

tabatkins commented 2 years ago

That was a joke. ^_^

I'm happy to port over at least the three changes I listed above (floating ToC, better handling of tables and wide elements, and darkmode), tho I won't get to them immediately.

tabatkins commented 6 months ago

One more thing to handle: since WHATWG defines its own set of styles for caniuse/MDN, they're lacking any response to the .overlapping-main class, which in the standard stylesheet makes them mostly transparent until hovered, so they don't obscure text as badly.

tabatkins commented 6 months ago

Okay, darkmode styling PR up at https://github.com/whatwg/whatwg.org/pull/429.