Breaking this out as a specific issue related to T327719 , for clarity.
I have been using V22 since the launch. Today is the first time it feels distinctly like a more scuffed experience than before, not just a different one.
The initial release had two issues with sidebar style that were frequently mentioned as needing attention (I did not see any positive mentions, but assume they also exist):
* The initial sidebar had too much horizontal spacing, and no non-whitespace delineation from the body text.
* The initial sidebar-TOC chose an implementation that wraps TOC lines, added a line for counting coments, and was free with linespace, making it hard to see more than a dozen sections at once, or even see how many there were overall, and requiring an in-sidebar TOC-scrollbar. This is particularly rough for pages that regularly have scores of sections: popular talk pages, noticeboards, user-talk pages of very active users.
The new update made both of these worse, and suggests that the above are not currently considered worth addressing. If that persists it is a problem for readers and editors alike.
* Sidebar text is now the same font size as the body text. This is confusing and hard to read.
* Sidebar linespacing is now //larger// than that of the body text. This is hard to read and a significant stylistic change.
* Sidebar sections are now hard to see: there is no font-face or font-size difference between section titles and links in the section, and no distinguishing linespacing. That goes against the layout style of all of our body-text, and most non-wiki publications.
These choices differ from the style of most infoboxes and navboxes on WM wikis. I would be keen to see examples of this that work well on other sites, online or in print. The **Tools** + **Main Menu** sidebars are also mismatched in many ways and look unfinished, but seem to be deployed everywhere now?
* Different spacing b/t them and the body
* Different horizontal placement w/in their side
* Different vertical alignment w/ the page
* Different line alignment of the bottom of each line (they don't line up)
* Different behavior when clicking "hide", different icon/text/caret for unhiding
* Interlanguage links now appear in all possible places, adding to the confusion. (language selector up top, 'Translations' in the user menu dropdown, prominent box saying 'your languages are in another castle' on the L, "edit interlanguage links" link — now the only instance of smaller font! — on the R)
I am stymied by all this :) Newcomers and readers may be too, with less recourse.
Screenshots of the misalignment across the sidebars (observed on chrome + ff / macos):
{F36456007}{F36456011}{F36456013}
**Expected behavior**:
I expected a bit more alignment in approach and stylistic sensibility between sidebar nav and main-content nav, so that we're at least all iterating towards the same goals.
# A sidebar style that matches the style of navigation in project content.
# A process for rolling out changes as significant as sidebar functionality + readability out to a subset of users for feedback, including a subset of community-layout-maintainers, not to all V22 users and all anons
# Restore roughly the padding and font-size and linespacing of the V2010 sidebar, with distinguishable sidebar headings. This is not particularly low-hanging fruit to improve -- unlike the idea of making use of the right hand margin -- and there's a downside to experimentally changing this for everyone.
# Make magic words like __TOC__ work with V22. This will give editors recourse to improve the reading experience for pages rendered less usable by the change: those with long TOCs, or those that rely on readers being able to see the whole TOC at once or to see numbered sections.