Unable to navigate docs on mobile

[Cali0707]

Expected Behavior

When navigating to the docs section of the website on mobile, I should be able to select the components I want (e.g. functions, serving, etc.)

Actual Behavior

I only see the options in the nav for the sub-categories on the home page of the docs:

Steps to Reproduce the Problem

1. Visit the docs page on mobile view

Additional Info

Additional context
Add any other context about the problem here.

Install information:

• Platform (GKE, IKS, AKS, etc.):
• Knative Version:

[Cali0707]

cc @dprotaso @evankanderson

[Cali0707]

IMO if we can't find a way to solve this before the graduation announcement, we should rollback the docs navigation changes that led to this - otherwise users won't be able to find anything on mobile

[evankanderson]

Thanks for flagging this! I thought I had tried it earlier and the navigation worked.

/accept

[evankanderson]

For me, if you select the back arrow in the upper-left you can navigate to the other topics, but I agree that the result is non-optimal (though I'm trying to figure out what the optimal result would be for both showing where you are in the nav and showing the parent topics).

[Cali0707]

For me, if you select the back arrow in the upper-left you can navigate to the other topics, but I agree that the result is non-optimal

Yeah, that worked for me as well - but the first time I tried the website on mobile that didn't occur to me. My fear is that users will look, and then leave the website when they can't find where they want to go quickly

[Cali0707]

IMO, if you navigate to the home for the docs on mobile, the side nav should give the "top-level" nav, not the nested nav for that page when you first visit it.

[dprotaso]

@Cali0707 that might be a mkdocs specific thing - eg. see: https://gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io/

[dprotaso]

and see - https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/

[Cali0707]

@Cali0707 that might be a mkdocs specific thing - eg. see: https://gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io/

Yeah somewhat, but before we changed how the nav works, when you went to the docs home you could see in the sidebar "Eventing", "Functions", etc.

Now, it is hard to find the docs section you want when you navigate to the "docs". For example, on smaller mobile screens on mobile currently, you can't even find the "docs" tab since it is only in the top nav (which is not correctly responsive):

Screen.Recording.2025-09-17.at.12.26.45.mov

Similarly, if you can find the docs tab (slightly wider screen), once you get there it is not really clear how to navigate to the actual docs you are looking for:

Screen.Recording.2025-09-17.at.12.28.35.mov

Also, needing to move "back" with an error is not intuitive in this case, as you would think that takes you to where you just were - which is "empty" on the home (non-docs) page you navigated from.

[Cali0707]

I get that the new nav makes the links nicer (and gets rid of the redirect we had from knative.dev to knative.dev/docs), but I don't think that value is worth the loss in usability of the site for mobile users

[dprotaso]

yeah I agree

[dprotaso]

One thing I noticed - on the home page the nav (in a compressed view) doesn't show anything.

[evankanderson]

I'm working on this this week; I'm hoping to get the nav working correctly on desktop with the double-bar, and on mobile with only a sidebar (and removing the hard-coding in our site template for the top bar that we do today).

[evankanderson]

/assign