Clicking on Textual details navigate to a new page. Ideally it should expand in place.
not critical, but would be nice indeed
This might in some cases be too large to expand in the sidebar so a new page might be needed.
Maybe you can change the size of sidebar accordingly.
Thanks for giving some thought to this. I’m guessing it would mainly be useful on tablets and phones: on a proper computer there’s not much difference between opening a new tab and opening in place.
In some cases the Textual Details are very large, as for example the case of DN16. We could perhaps put a filter on it to expand if the size is not too great. Otherwise, perhaps expand the sidebar to full page. We’ll think about it, but it won’t be a priority.
I think it would be best to optimise for each screen size and device type than one size fits all approach if this can be considered. The latter every one is slightly dissatisfied at best.
The problem is that there are many, many screen sizes and devices; and even on the same device, people will use it in different ways and have different preferences. Trying to support everything is a nightmare. Not only is it simply too much work for a small team like ours, it results in bloated and complicated code, which must all be regularly maintained and updated as devices evolve. So we try to make one interface that works well on mobiles, then scale it up.
However I make the assumption—perhaps wrongly—that on mobiles people will be more interested in simply reading and less in research, so the more esoteric details are backgrounded for mobiles.
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There are frameworks which automatically do this for you.
Well, kind of, but not really. We don’t rely much on front-end frameworks (apart from jQuery), we try to roll our own code: leaner and better. Whatever framework you use, you have to teach it how to behave, and unless you’re building it that way from scratch, it’s probably no harder to just write a few lines of JS and CSS, if you have developers who know what they’re doing. I think our site works very well on different devices, and don’t see any need to deploy some framework. If we want to accomplish something, we’ll just write it. Not say we’d never use a framework, but we’d just have to have a compelling reason, and so far I haven’t seen one.
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In which case instead of navigating away from a page can you add replacing the content for Textual details.
It is best to cut down on navigating a way to new pages but dynamically replace content of a page. This gives better user experience and also you can have hot keys like Esc / Backspace to return to previous view.