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Over at https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/388593/1709587, Cerbrus, James, and Zoe discovered a curiosity: if, at the moment that you load the /ask page, your browser window is 1000px wide, all tag excerpts are hidden when you go to add tags to your question:

Screenshot illustrating the claim above

A little experimentation reveals that this happens when the browser width is between 981 and 1063 pixels, inclusive. The tag descriptions are shown for widths of 1064px and above or 980px and below. Notably, there doesn't seem to be any need to hide the tag descriptions on narrow screens; they show completely fine at 500px browser width, as shown in the screenshot below:

Screenshot illustrating the claim above

As such, there doesn't appear to be - at least at present - any rational reason for this behaviour to exist. And at least on Stack Overflow, the usage guidance in these excerpts serves a valuable role disambiguating tags and preventing their misuse; it's a bad thing that they're being hidden.

Can we remove this behaviour and make tag excerpts be shown regardless of screen size?

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  • We did a little bit of exploration of different approaches here and decided there's nothing small we want to do that would improve the UX of this. We'll definitely re-evaluate the solution here at different breakpoints the next time we revisit this component. Thanks for reporting.
    – Meg Risdal StaffMod
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 4:22
  • 2
    @MeganRisdal [status-deferred] or [status-reproduced] might fit better if it will be changed eventually :)
    – Robotnik
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 5:17
  • @Robotnik Yeah that's a reasonable point but I'd worry we'd just lose track of this report (just being real...) and designing something that works at all breakpoints is simply a matter of procedure for us now so this feedback would be taken into account regardless.
    – Meg Risdal StaffMod
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 5:59
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    I'll update to [status-deferred] since I think that makes most sense in this context.
    – Meg Risdal StaffMod
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 6:01
  • @MeganRisdal I'm kind of surprised there isn't a trivial fix. The HTML that gets loaded for the tag popup at <981px or >1063px works fine if you then resize your browser. All that needs to change, I would think, is to delete the slimmed-down 1000px HTML from the codebase entirely and use a single version of the HTML for the popup at all screen sizes. But I guess maybe that's non-trivial for reasons I can't see, so I'll, uh, defer to your judgement on the matter.
    – Mark Amery
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 11:36
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    @MeganRisdal (Honestly, I don't entirely get why there's any UI on the site that depends upon the screen size at initial page load. It's particularly mysterious to me given that this is literally the only thing I can find that behaves like this. All the rest of the site smoothly handles me resizing my screen after the page is loaded without having to refresh; it's just this one place where the initial screen size dictates what I see - and yet it's broken. And apparently it can't be easily fixed either. I do find myself scratching my head about what's going on under the hood.)
    – Mark Amery
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 11:40

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