To the left of table of content entries you can click on an open/close icon to toggle the visibility of different levels of the table of contents.
The main use case covered by the expansion algorithm is as follows:
- the page starts with all nodes open to facilitate Ctrl + F queries
- if you click on a node in that sate, you close all its children, to get a summarized overview of the contents
- if you click one of those children, it opens only its own children, so you can interactively continue exploring the tree
The exact behaviour is:
- the clicked node is open:
- state 1 all children are closed. Action: open all children recursively, which puts us in state 2
- state 2: not all children are closed. Action close all children, which puts us in state 1. This gives a good overview of the children, without any children of children getting in the way.
- state 3: the clicked node is closed (not showing any children). Action: open it to show all direct children, but not further descendants (i.e. close those children). This puts us in state 1.
Note that those rules make it impossible to close a node by clicking on it, the only way to close a node os to click on its parent, the state transitions are:but we feel that it is worth it to do things like this to cover the main use case described above without having to add two buttons per entry.
- 3 -> 1
- 1 -> 2
- 2 -> 1
Clicking on the link from a header up to the table of contents also automatically opens up the node for you in case it had been previously closed manually.