It doesn't look quite right, because the lines are too far apart,
and it's not going to be announced by screenreaders as a menu button,
since that's not what the symbol means.
This adds a real tooltip and uses a better drawing of the icon.
This is a redesign of the feature, with parts pulled from
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/119049
but with a button that looks more like a button and matches the
one used on other sidebar pages.
rustdoc: allow resizing the sidebar / hiding the top bar
Fixes#97306
Preview: http://notriddle.com/rustdoc-html-demo-4/sidebar-resize/std/index.html
## Summary
This feature adds:
1. A checkbox to the Settings popover to hide the persistent navigation bar (the sidebar on large viewports and the top bar on small ones).
2. On large viewports, it adds a resize handle to the persistent sidebar. Resizing it into nothing is equivalent to turning off the persistent navigation bar checkbox in Settings.
3. If the navigation bar is hidden, a toolbar button to the left of the search appears. Clicking it brings the navigation bar back.
## Motivation
While "mobile mode" is definitely a good default, it's not the only reason people have wanted to hide the sidebar:
* Some people use tiling window managers, and don't like rustdoc's current breakpoints. Changing the breakpoints might help with that, but there's no perfect solution, because there's a gap between "huge screen" and "smartphone" where reasonable people can disagree about whether it makes sense for the sidebar to be on-screen. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/97306
* Some people ask for ways to reduce on-screen clutter because it makes it easier to focus. There's not a media query for that (and if there was, privacy-conscious users would turn it off). https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/59829
This feature is designed to avoid these problems. Resizing the sidebar especially helps, because it provides a way to hide the sidebar without adding a new top-level button (which would add clutter), and it provides a way to make rustdoc play nicer in complex, custom screen layouts.
## Guide and Reference-level explanation
On a desktop or laptop with a mouse, resize the sidebar by dragging its right edge.
On any browser, including mobile phones, the sticky top bar or side bar can be hidden from the Settings area (the button with the cog wheel, next to the search bar). When it's hidden, a convenient button will appear on the search bar's left.
## Drawbacks
This adds more JavaScript code to the render blocking area.
## Rationale and alternatives
The most obvious way to allow people to hide the sidebar would have been to let them "manually enter mobile mode." The upside is that it's a feature we already have. The downside is that it's actually really hard to come up with a terse description. Is it:
* A Setting that forces desktop viewers to always have the mobile-style top bar? If so, how do we label it? Should it be visible on mobile, and, if so, does it just not do anything?
* A persistent hide/show sidebar button, present on desktop, just like on mobile? That's clutter that I'd like to avoid.
## Prior art
* The new file browser in GitHub uses a similar divider with a mouse-over indicator
* mdBook and macOS Finder both allow you to resize the sidebar to nothing as a gesture to hide it
* https://www.nngroup.com/articles/drag-drop/
## Future possibilities
https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/266220-rustdoc/topic/Table.20of.20contents proposes a new, second sidebar (a table of contents). How should it fit in with this feature? Should it be resizeable? Hideable? Can it be accessed on mobile?
This is about equally readable, a lot more terse, and stops
special-casing functions and methods.
```console
$ du -hs doc-old/ doc-new/
671M doc-old/
670M doc-new/
```
This is an attempt to balance three problems, each of which would
be violated by a simpler implementation:
- A type alias should show all the `impl` blocks for the target
type, and vice versa, if they're applicable. If nothing was
done, and rustdoc continues to match them up in HIR, this
would not work.
- Copying the target type's docs into its aliases' HTML pages
directly causes far too much redundant HTML text to be generated
when a crate has large numbers of methods and large numbers
of type aliases.
- Using JavaScript exclusively for type alias impl docs would
be a functional regression, and could make some docs very hard
to find for non-JS readers.
- Making sure that only applicable docs are show in the
resulting page requires a type checkers. Do not reimplement
the type checker in JavaScript.
So, to make it work, rustdoc stashes these type-alias-inlined docs
in a JSONP "database-lite". The file is generated in `write_shared.rs`,
included in a `<script>` tag added in `print_item.rs`, and `main.js`
takes care of patching the additional docs into the DOM.
The format of `trait.impl` and `type.impl` JS files are superficially
similar. Each line, except the JSONP wrapper itself, belongs to a crate,
and they are otherwise separate (rustdoc should be idempotent). The
"meat" of the file is HTML strings, so the frontend code is very simple.
Links are relative to the doc root, though, so the frontend needs to fix
that up, and inlined docs can reuse these files.
However, there are a few differences, caused by the sophisticated
features that type aliases have. Consider this crate graph:
```text
---------------------------------
| crate A: struct Foo<T> |
| type Bar = Foo<i32> |
| impl X for Foo<i8> |
| impl Y for Foo<i32> |
---------------------------------
|
----------------------------------
| crate B: type Baz = A::Foo<i8> |
| type Xyy = A::Foo<i8> |
| impl Z for Xyy |
----------------------------------
```
The type.impl/A/struct.Foo.js JS file has a structure kinda like this:
```js
JSONP({
"A": [["impl Y for Foo<i32>", "Y", "A::Bar"]],
"B": [["impl X for Foo<i8>", "X", "B::Baz", "B::Xyy"], ["impl Z for Xyy", "Z", "B::Baz"]],
});
```
When the type.impl file is loaded, only the current crate's docs are
actually used. The main reason to bundle them together is that there's
enough duplication in them for DEFLATE to remove the redundancy.
The contents of a crate are a list of impl blocks, themselves
represented as lists. The first item in the sublist is the HTML block,
the second item is the name of the trait (which goes in the sidebar),
and all others are the names of type aliases that successfully match.
This way:
- There's no need to generate these files for types that have no aliases
in the current crate. If a dependent crate makes a type alias, it'll
take care of generating its own docs.
- There's no need to reimplement parts of the type checker in
JavaScript. The Rust backend does the checking, and includes its
results in the file.
- Docs defined directly on the type alias are dropped directly in the
HTML by `render_assoc_items`, and are accessible without JavaScript.
The JSONP file will not list impl items that are known to be part
of the main HTML file already.
[JSONP]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP
This is shorter, avoids potential conflicts with a crate
named `implementors`[^1], and will be less confusing when JS
include files are added for type aliases.
[^1]: AFAIK, this couldn't actually cause any problems right now,
but it's simpler just to make it impossible than relying on never
having a file named `trait.Foo.js` in the crate data area.
rustdoc-search: add impl disambiguator to duplicate assoc items
Preview (to see the difference, click the link and pay attention to the specific function that comes up):
| Before | After |
|--|--|
| [`simd<i64>, simd<i64> -> simd<i64>`](https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/?search=simd%3Ci64%3E%2C%20simd%3Ci64%3E%20-%3E%20simd%3Ci64%3E) | [`simd<i64>, simd<i64> -> simd<i64>`](https://notriddle.com/rustdoc-demo-html-3/impl-disambiguate-search/std/index.html?search=simd%3Ci64%3E%2C%20simd%3Ci64%3E%20-%3E%20simd%3Ci64%3E) |
| [`cow, vec -> bool`](https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/?search=cow%2C%20vec%20-%3E%20bool) | [`cow, vec -> bool`](https://notriddle.com/rustdoc-demo-html-3/impl-disambiguate-search/std/index.html?search=cow%2C%20vec%20-%3E%20bool)
Helps with #90929
This changes the search results, specifically, when there's more than one impl with an associated item with the same name. For example, the search queries `simd<i8> -> simd<i8>` and `simd<i64> -> simd<i64>` don't link to the same function, but most of the functions have the same names.
This change should probably be FCP-ed, especially since it adds a new anchor link format for `main.js` to handle, so that URLs like `struct.Vec.html#impl-AsMut<[T]>-for-Vec<T,+A>/method.as_mut` redirect to `struct.Vec.html#method.as_mut-2`. It's a strange design, but there are a few reasons for it:
* I'd like to avoid making the HTML bigger. Obviously, fixing this bug is going to add at least a little more data to the search index, but adding more HTML penalises viewers for the benefit of searchers.
* Breaking `struct.Vec.html#method.len` would also be a disappointment.
On the other hand:
* The path-style anchors might be less prone to link rot than the numbered anchors. It's definitely less likely to have URLs that appear to "work", but silently point at the wrong thing.
* This commit arranges the path-style anchor to redirect to the numbered anchor. Nothing stops rustdoc from doing the opposite, making path-style anchors the default and redirecting the "legacy" numbered ones.
### The bug
On the "Before" links, this example search calls for `i64`:
But if I click any of the results, I get `f64` instead.
The PR fixes this problem by adding enough information to the search result `href` to disambiguate methods with different types but the same name.
More detailed description of the problem at:
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/109422#issuecomment-1491089293
> When a struct/enum/union has multiple impls with different type parameters, it can have multiple methods that have the same name, but which are on different impls. Besides Simd, [Any](https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/any/trait.Any.html?search=any%3A%3Adowncast) also demonstrates this pattern. It has three methods named `downcast`, on three different impls.
>
> When that happens, it presents a challenge in linking to the method. Normally we link like `#method.foo`. When there are multiple `foo`, we number them like `#method.foo`, `#method.foo-1`, `#method.foo-2`, etc.
>
> It also presents a challenge for our search code. Currently we store all the variants in the index, but don’t have any way to generate unambiguous URLs in the results page, or to distinguish them in the SERP.
>
> To fix this, we need three things:
>
> 1. A fragment format that fully specifies the impl type parameters when needed to disambiguate (`#impl-SimdOrd-for-Simd<i64,+LANES>/method.simd_max`)
> 2. A search index that stores methods with enough information to disambiguate the impl they were on.
> 3. A search results interface that can display multiple methods on the same type with the same name, when appropriate OR a disambiguation landing section on item pages?
>
> For reviewers: it can be hard to see the new fragment format in action since it immediately gets rewritten to the numbered form.
This commit makes three changes for consistency and readability:
- It shows the sibling navigation on module pages. It's weird
that it didn't work before, and is inconsistent with everything
else (even Crates have sibling navigation with other Crates).
- It hides the "In [parent]" header if it's the same as the
current crate, and if there's no other header between them.
We need to keep it on modules and types, since they have
their own header and data between them, and we don't want
to show siblings under a header implying that they're children.
- It adds a margin to deal with the headers butting directly into
the branding lockup.
This commit changes the layout to something a bit less "look at my logo!!!111"
gigantic, and makes it clearer where clicking the logo will actually take you.
It also means the crate name is persistently at the top of the sidebar, even
when in a sub-item page, and clicking that name takes you back to the root.
| | Short crate name | Long crate name |
|---------|------------------|-----------------|
| Root | ![short-root] | ![long-root]
| Subpage | ![short-subpage] | ![long-subpage]
[short-root]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/assets/1593513/fe2ce102-d4b8-44e6-9f7b-68636a907f56
[short-subpage]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/assets/1593513/29501663-56c0-4151-b7de-d2637e167125
[long-root]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/assets/1593513/f6a385c0-b4c5-4a9c-954b-21b38de4192f
[long-subpage]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/assets/1593513/97ec47b4-61bf-4ebe-b461-0d2187b8c6cahttps://notriddle.com/rustdoc-html-demo-4/logo-lockup/image/index.htmlhttps://notriddle.com/rustdoc-html-demo-4/logo-lockup/crossbeam_channel/index.htmlhttps://notriddle.com/rustdoc-html-demo-4/logo-lockup/adler/struct.Adler32.htmlhttps://notriddle.com/rustdoc-html-demo-4/logo-lockup/crossbeam_channel/struct.Sender.html
This improves visual information density (the construct with the logo and
crate name is *shorter* than the logo on its own, because it's not
square) and navigation clarity (we can now see what clicking the Rust logo
does, specifically).
Compare this with the layout at [Phoenix's Hexdocs] (which is what this
proposal is closely based on), the old proposal on [Internals Discourse]
(which always says "Rust standard library" in the sidebar, but doesn't do the
side-by-side layout).
[Phoenix's Hexdocs]: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/1.7.7/overview.html
[Internals Discourse]: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/poc-of-a-new-design-for-the-generated-rustdoc/11018
In newer versions of rustdoc, the crate name and version are always shown in
the sidebar, even in subpages. Clicking the crate name does the same thing
clicking the logo always did: return you to the crate root.
While this actually takes up less screen real estate than the old layout on
desktop, it takes up more HTML. It's also a bit more visually complex.
I could do what the Internals POC did and keep the vertically stacked layout
all the time, instead of doing a horizontal stack where possible. It would
take up more screen real estate, though.
This design is lifted almost verbatim from Hexdocs. It seems to work for them.
[`opentelemetry_process_propagator`], for example, has a long application name.
[`opentelemetry_process_propagator`]: https://hexdocs.pm/opentelemetry_process_propagator/OpentelemetryProcessPropagator.html
Has anyone written the rationale on why the Rust logo shows up on projects that
aren't the standard library? If we turned it off on non-standard crates by
default, it would line wrap crate names a lot less often.
Or maybe we should encourage crate authors to include their own logo more
often? It certainly helps give people a better sense of "place."
I'm not sure of anything that directly follows up this one. Plenty of other
changes could be made to improve the layout, like
* coming up with a less cluttered way to do disclosure (there's a lot of `[-]`
on the page)
* doing a better job of separating lateral navigation (vec::Vec links to
vec::IntoIter) and the table of contents (vec::Vec links to vec::Vec::new)
* giving readers more control of how much rustdoc hows them, and giving doc
authors more control of how much it generates
* better search that reduces the need to browse
But those are mostly orthogonal, not future possibilities unlocked by this change.
