Suggestion for improving JS/API sidebars — add labels to indicate page types.

[chrisdavidmills]

@valango commented on Fri Sep 25 2020

Request type

• Please close this issue, I accidentally submitted it without adding any details
• New documentation
• Correction or update

Details

The left-side navigation column at (https://wiki.developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript)
is somewhat confusing for people not experienced in Javascript - labels for constuctors, interfaces and global object instances/namespaces all look the same.

Perhaps it would be helpful to have a "type tag" next to object name, like below (do not mind the bullets in the left):

• Math namespace
• NaN constant
• ...
• TypeError constructor
• TypedArray interface

Almost everything is an object in Javascript, so the current presentation is correct, of course.
Adding some specifics would just make it a little more helpful for newbies.

Sorry, I am newbie myself to the Wiki editor, so could not find the right place to make those changes. ;)

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@chrisdavidmills commented on Mon Sep 28 2020

I like this idea, but we don't have the capacity to look into it now. I'm going to transfer this to the Kuma (MDN platform) repo, and we can hopefully put it the backlog to consider as we redesign sidebars in the next iteration of MDN.

[caugner]

@wbamberg What are your opinions on this?

[wbamberg]

AFAICT this is talking about the "Global Objects" section of the sidebar, which does include things that don't look like objects, such as NaN and parseInt() (and of course namespaces have come up in #3826).

But I don't think the solution would be to label every entry. That would make the sidebar very noisy. It would be better to reorganize the sidebar so that section does only contain objects, and if necessary have other sections for things like global functions and maybe namespaces, and label each section properly. This is also tied to mdn/content#16156 .

So maybe we should close this one and track that work in #3826?

[caugner]

So maybe we should close this one and track that work in #3826?

Sounds good to me! Closing in favor of #3826.

I guess the problem also is that NaN is a child of Global_Objects, so the hierarchy itself is misleading and the JS sidebar is merely building on top of that.