959308 - MDN move broke searchability

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Editing, defect)

Description

[Dave Camp (:dcamp)]

I used to leave a tab open with the addon-sdk docs loaded and use cmd-f to search for keywords to find URLs.

Since the MDN move, I have to manually expand things for that to work.  Any chance the API names could be pre-expanded?

Comment 1

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

So the request here is for the Add-on SDK pages in MDN to include the full list of the APIs, expanded by default, so it's easy to navigate to a particular API. For reference, this is what it used to have: http://web.archive.org/web/20140107130205/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/.

Currently in MDN the APIs are listed in the Add-ons Zone subnav, in 2 separate sections, Add-on SDK/High-level APIs and Add-on SDK/Low-level APIs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK. But these sections are collapsed by default.

I'm not sure what's the best way to achieve this. I believe it's possible to specify that a section of the subnav should be expended by default by giving it a particular class. But there are a couple of problems with doing that:

1) I think you can only expand a single subnav section like that. Here there are 2: one for high-level APIs and once for low-level APIs. We could stuff all the APIs in one section, but I'd prefer to keep this distinction - or at least, this doesn't seem like a good reason for removing it.

2) I think you can only do expand-by-default in this way for a complete zone. But this subnav is for the entire Add-ons Zone, and we don't want these subsections expanded for all of Add-ons, only for the pages under the Add-on SDK node. The desire here would be to "override" the default top-level behavior in the Add-on SDK part of the Add-ons Zone.

Is there another way we could accomplish this with the tools that we have? I did look into this problem when I made these pages, and investigated using Quick Links, but I got told that we're not supposed to use Quick Links for pages that also had the Zone subnav (which sort of makes sense: having both seems like too many overlapping navigation things).