On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:

I'd really push us to leave the left menu as it is (with some visual separation) and think of the user button as more of a profile page then a place to find features. Where watch star goes is another question.

I tend to agree with Jon on this; two menus _is_ harder to discover, but it's a good place to put an individual button or two that don't need to be followed through a submenu.

Another thing to consider is changing how we deal with the search bar to give us more space. Bringing, again ;) Facebook as an example -- search is prominent *in the left nav menu* but only has a full field when you're actively there. Their regular header bar instead has three buttons (one of which I actually use, for notifications).

If we collapsed the initial search field into a search button that opened the search overlay (or, a link to a dedicated search page on no-JS), we'd have more room for things like the watchlist star. A "user profile/notifications" combined button could serve as the login CTA as well.

In terms of fixed positioning the only way to do this reliably and nicely (and then only if JavaScript is enabled) is to use something like iscroll and reimplement native browser scrolling.

We had bad performance with iscroll in iOS 4 on the PhoneGap app; I'm not sure I'd recommend using it. Its performance gets worse and worse as your page size increases. :(

I think I'd rather have non-floating toolbars where position:fixed is not known to work as expected, or just live without them entirely. :P

-- brion