1439438 - Document compat status of individual TransitionType values

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: Add-ons, defect, P1)

Description

[Rob Hoelz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
Build ID: 20180207210535

Steps to reproduce:

  * Wrote a simple test webextension that prints web navigation data (https://gist.github.com/hoelzro/a58d512039bcd8c8ca3e69d1e417757c)
  * Used "about:debugging" to load the webextension into Firefox
  * Used "firefox https://ddg.gg" to open a URL from the command line (I also tried with a link that doesn't hit a redirect on the server to make sure that wasn't confusing things)


Actual results:

  * Events came in with transitionType set to "link" (see log at https://gist.github.com/hoelzro/a58d512039bcd8c8ca3e69d1e417757c)


Expected results:

  * The first event should have had transitionType "start_page", according to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/webNavigation/transitionType

Comment 1

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Attachment: Screenshot-2018-3-6 webNavigation TransitionType.png

"start_page" transitionType is not currently supported (and "link" is a fallback used when the actual transitiontype is unknown/unimplemented). 

The MDN docs at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/webNavigation/transitionType already mention that but in a place that is not immediately visible, because it is in the implementation notes from the "Browser compatibility" table, which are hidden until the user clicks on the arrow that expands the section (I'm attaching a screenshot that shows the notes once expanded).

One way to make it a bit more visible could probably be to highlight the following paragraph:

```
Note that many values here are not currently supported in Firefox: see the browser compatibility table for details.
```

:wbamberg what do you think? would be this a good way to make this limitations more clearly visible?

Comment 2

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

Given that these docs are supposed to be cross-browser, I'm not very keen on talking much about individual browsers in the main body of the doc. The basic idea is: people need to check the browser compat tables. They can't rely on the compat status being recorded in the main body of the doc.

But we should definitely make the compat table clearer. I suggest we split out the individual TransitionType values and document them all individually in the browser compat data. Then each value would get its own row in the table (as we already do for many items, such as permissions: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/permissions#Browser_compatibility). That way the information is not hidden in a note.

Do you think that would work?

Comment 3

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Definitely, +1 from me, that seems way better than my initial proposal.

Comment 4

[Chris Mills [:cmills]]

I've submitted a PR to change the transitionType compat data as desired:

https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/pull/3132

Let me know if you think this needs anything else. Thanks!