| | 4 | |
| | 5 | Another point only briefly touched on above is that with the icons added to the page, they: |
| | 6 | A) can affect the page layout, and |
| | 7 | B) don't hover over elements which are absolutely positioned. |
| | 8 | |
| | 9 | Twentythirteen is a good example of a theme which has both issues. The menu icon causes the menu area to become twice as thick and the footer widgets are all positioned away from their icons. |
| | 10 | |
| | 11 | Making the icons absolutely positioned "solves" this by removing the icons from the document flow. Unfortunately this opens another can of worms. It requires very careful positioning to prevent the icon from completely covering its target, not falling off the page, not appearing to relate to another page element, etc. Also when certain DOM changes take place (eg: repositioning widgets in Twentythirteen) the icons do not automatically follow, so we must listen to all sorts of changes and perform manual repositions. |
| | 12 | |
| | 13 | The implementation on wp.com does all of these things to support the widest array of themes possible, and we're still tweaking it every so often. I was hoping to avoid the issue in core, but unless we disable this feature for certain themes, I'm starting to see us going down the same road. |