Auto-expand details elements

Category: Miscellaneous
Type: New or changed feature
Status: In development (Chrome In development)
Intent stage: Evaluate readiness to ship

Summary

This feature will make closed details elements searchable and automatically expand when the browser tries to scroll to their hidden contents in response to find-in-page, ScrollToTextFragment, and element fragment navigation.

Motivation

This feature will allow scroll to text links and element fragment links to become capable of targeting content inside of collapsed details elements by making the browser open them before scrolling to the desired content. It will also allow find-in-page to search through content inside collapsed details elements by expanding them before find-in-page scrolls to them, effectively making much more content in existing webpages searchable. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1058732 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1185950 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4051 https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/6466

Standards & signals

Specification: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/6466
Firefox: Positive
Safari: No signal
Web developers: No signals — Here is a user reported bug requesting this feature: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1058732 Here is an article I found describing the lack of element fragment navigation: https://www.sitepoint.com/fixing-the-details-element/#:~:text=the%20target%20element%20is%20inside%20a%20collapsed%20region
Tracking bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1185950

Docs: https://github.com/WICG/display-locking/blob/main/explainers/auto-expanding-details-explainer.md https://github.com/WICG/display-locking/blob/main/privacy-assessments/auto-expanding-details-privacy.md

Explainers: https://github.com/WICG/display-locking/blob/main/explainers/auto-expanding-details-explainer.md

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