Sticky Table of Contents with Scrolling Active States

This article explores a common documentation layout: a two-column design featuring a main content column and a sidebar. The sidebar, often sparsely populated, is ideal for a sticky table of contents, enhancing navigation through lengthy, scrollable content.

Bramus Van Damme provides an excellent tutorial detailing this approach. He emphasizes semantic HTML and CSS, reserving JavaScript for the crucial active navigation enhancement. Without direct user clicks (where :target styling might suffice), JavaScript is essential to track scroll position and highlight the appropriate navigation item. This is elegantly achieved using the IntersectionObserver API.

The resulting implementation is shown below: [Insert image or link to the result here if available]

This design closely resembles Hakim El Hattab's "Progress Nav" demo. While sharing the same fundamental structure, Hakim's version incorporates a sophisticated SVG path animation to visually represent navigation progress, including indentation for sub-navigation. A video demonstration is embedded below: [Embed video here if available]

Hakim's implementation doesn't utilize IntersectionObserver. A potentially interesting project would be to combine both approaches for an even more robust and visually appealing solution.

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