Last modified: 2014-06-17 17:27:09 UTC
The icon (down arrow or chevron) on the action dropdown in Vector (now labeled with "more") animates when clicked. This animation serves no purpose, since it does not close or open the dropdown. Screencast: http://quick.as/dzywsxlq
It "pins" the dropdown, so that it says open when you move your mouse away. The pinning is an accessibility feature (makes the items inside the dropdown accessible with keyboard-only navigation), the animation was added relatively recently and is meant to provide some sort of a visual indicator for the pinning. The behavior is here to stay, but better ideas on what indicator to use would definitely be useful.
Do any other flyouts in mediawiki work like this? it seems odd.
(In reply to Jared Zimmerman (WMF) from comment #2) > Do any other flyouts in mediawiki work like this? it seems odd. The notifications flyout definitely does not. It follows the behavior I expect, which is that a click closes or opens the flyout just like hover would.
There are no other hover-only flyouts that contain navigational menus. So no.
I agree that the Vector drop-down menu is strange. I happened to notice this recently as well. You can just hover the mouse over it and keep clicking and that triangle just moves up and down a little. I found the behavior unexpected and I thought it had the appearance of being broken.
(In reply to Bartosz Dziewoński from comment #1) > the animation was added relatively recently In <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/110584/>.
(In reply to Bartosz Dziewoński from comment #1) > It "pins" the dropdown, so that it says open when you move your mouse away. > > The pinning is an accessibility feature (makes the items inside the dropdown > accessible with keyboard-only navigation), [...] The pinning seems great. I don't think anyone objects to it. > the animation was added > relatively recently and is meant to provide some sort of a visual indicator > for the pinning. The behavior is here to stay, but better ideas on what > indicator to use would definitely be useful. Is there a bug report or can you link the relevant Gerrit change for the animation? The animation feels a bit ehhh. I'm unclear what exactly the use-case for animation is, but in the past adding (any?) user interface animation has required a fairly high burden of proof that it's absolutely necessary, as I recall. [Mid-air collision, reading the change now. Thanks for the link!] The other strange behavior I find is that clicking "More" when the menu is expanded does not currently re-collapse the menu. The lack of collapsing is weird, especially when it's only accompanied by a very small animation of a related triangle icon. This is the part that looks particularly broken. Is the lack of collapsing due to the menu expanding on hover _or_ click? It seems as though even if I don't move the mouse at all and only click, that does not re-collapse the menu when it is expanded. That seems like a bug.
Okay, so I read <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/110584>. I personally don't see a very compelling case for the animation. It seems to be mostly "because we can (with CSS)", which I agree is nice and neat, but I'm not sure this animation is necessary or helpful... it feels a bit superfluous and distracting and, in my opinion, and perhaps mixed with the lack of menu re-collapsing on click, it looks a bit broken. On other hand, I mostly use Monobook. :-) Fomafix: in the months since this change was merged, have you had any further thoughts about this? If there's to be any animation, perhaps flipping the triangle upside down would be better? Though that's typically associated with sorting... so perhaps change the icon to a "+" and do something with that? Blergh.
(In reply to MZMcBride from comment #8) > Okay, so I read <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/110584>. I personally don't > see a very compelling case for the animation. It seems to be mostly "because > we can (with CSS)", which I agree is nice and neat, but I'm not sure this > animation is necessary or helpful... it feels a bit superfluous and > distracting and, in my opinion, and perhaps mixed with the lack of menu > re-collapsing on click, it looks a bit broken. On other hand, I mostly use > Monobook. :-) Fomafix: in the months since this change was merged, have you > had any further thoughts about this? Agreed. > If there's to be any animation, perhaps flipping the triangle upside down > would be better? Though that's typically associated with sorting... so > perhaps change the icon to a "+" and do something with that? Blergh. The fundamental problem here is that a chevron like this is not typically used to representing "pinning" something permanently.[1] Instead, this kind of downward arrow is usually only to represent opening of a dropdown menu.[2] 1. http://thenounproject.com/search/?q=pin 2. http://thenounproject.com/search/?q=dropdown
Feel free to invent an other indicator for menuForceShow in skin vector.
