Provide Mobile Menu?

[mrwweb]

Discussion on #139 has raised a question for me about the menu on mobile.

Where are you all going? No! Please come back!

The only way to a cross-browser, nice menu—something like the Facebook drawer or the classic Hamburger—is through some new markup, javascript, and required CSS.

These are things that will be harder to work with for custom sheets that are more than just "skins" of something like modern.css, but provide a way better experience for 90+% of plans.

I think we have to choose whether we bring in a JS menu that has to be used for all custom stylesheets (we could potentially make it relatively easy to change the breakpoint at which it gets used) or sacrifice the mobile experience a bit for flexibility. Even though I've written those non-skin stylesheets in the past, I vote for the less-flexible but usable mobile menu.

[kellylor] had done some wireframe sketches of ideas, but I can't find those right now.

[iangreenleaf]

This seems reasonable. Obviously flexibility is preferred when we can get it, but if it means big sacrifices to the user experience, I'm fine with giving it up, especially on mobile. I'm also fine with mobile generally offering less control over the layout to stylesheets, as far as that may be necessary to make it functional. The metaphorical margins on mobile platforms are slimmer and people are generally more interested in speed and usability than in window dressing.

[mrwweb]

Additional idea: We might consider adding some mobile-only navigation that includes at least a "View next plan in autoread list" (just "Next"?) and possibly "Edit".

[ielerol]

Oh, those wireframes are...5 years old, nearly, at this point? I'm almost afraid to look at them, but I did dig them up.

I also support less-flexible but more usable styling for mobile devices. Stylesheet writing is not a core need of most plans users, non-terrible mobile functionality definitely is.

I can think about alternative approaches too.

[iangreenleaf]

I like those wireframes. I would also be very happy if that sort of design can be implemented solely with some tweaks to the existing markup and some media queries (as opposed to serving entirely different content to mobile clients, something I would like to avoid). It seems doable to me, but I'm no frontend expert. What do you all think?

[mrwweb]

At the time, I recall feeling fairly confident we'd need markup changes to do this (though to be clear, not anything requiring browser-sniffing). The alternative is that we could make said changes with JS manipulation and duplication of the DOM. That makes me pretty sad as it's very much a JS-required strategy, but it's the fastest route, I'd imagine.