make sidebar stay in view while scrolling? about scribble HOT 3 OPEN

cc @mbutterick

from scribble.

I don’t love the navigational sidebar, since it’s sort of a ’90s web-design trope. Though I’m open to better ideas, I haven’t come up with one:

• As you noticed, the sidebar can be any length, so fixing its location won’t work.

• At one point I tried making the sidebar separately scrollable from the rest of the page, but that felt janky and finicky.

• Hiding / showing the sidebar with a click or hover feels like a chore.

My best alternative idea has been to move it to the top of the page in a two-column display, and then make it available below as a sort of “HUD” display.

The other longstanding problem is that the sidebar disappears entirely on a narrow display. This is intentional — it doesn’t fit, otherwise — but ultimately I would like to move toward a layout that’s designed from the ground up to work on screens of differing widths (which the original layout was not)

from scribble.

@mbutterick Although I still think it's nice for document reading to have a sidebar showing table of contents, I agree that better alternatives should be considered. There's no better ideas in my head for now. However it's very nice to see you've been planning things on this.

from scribble.