Navigation sidebar border-top disappears on dark theme

[paulinashakirova]

Describe the bug
Border top of navigation side-bar is inconsistent between light and dark theme.

Impact and severity
Depends on whether this is a bug or is implemented this way by design.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Switch between dark and light themes

Expected behavior
The border, on dark theme, to be identical (lighter) to the right border of the side-bar, as it is on light theme.

Minimum reproducible sandbox
This can be reproduced in the documentation.

Screenshots

Additional context
It seems that the code related to this issue comes from the /eui/packages/eui/src/components/header/header.styles.ts where there is a separate logic for both themes. In the DARK theme the backgroundColor is used to define the bottom border color, whereas for the default theme the defaultBorderColor is used.

There is also a comment about this difference.

/**
 * The `dark` header is (currently) a bit of a special case. We don't
 * actually want to use <EuiThemeProvider colorMode="dark"> inside it
 * because that will affect popovers and `SelectableSitewideTemplate`
 * as well, which we do not necessarily want to do (?)
 *
 * It's also possible that the dark header will go away or become unused
 * by Kibana in the near future, at which point we can remove this
 */

This issue was previously opened on Kibana's side, but I’d like to transfer the issue to EUI repo so that the team could check if this is intentional or if this is a bug.

[mgadewoll]

ℹ The component in question here used for the navigation on Serverless is EuiCollapsibleNavBeta

The dark top border comes from the header component which has a dark bottom border.

So either the header should always have a lighter bottom border or the flyout (I guess that's unlikely) or the EuiCollapsibleNavBeta would need to have a separate top border in the expected lighter shade.

On non-serverless Kibana this is a bit less clear as the sidebar itself doesn't have a right border.

@MichaelMarcialis do you have any additional thoughts on this?

cc @ek-so

[ek-so]

The second part of the problem seems to be that the top bar itself in the dark mode has a wrong color, and looks cropped here:

As soon as we change the color, it starts looking fine (imo):

[cee-chen]

The "problematic" code is coming from here:

eui/packages/eui/src/components/header/header.styles.ts

Lines 34 to 39 in b69409b

	// Curated border color to fade into the shadow without looking too much like a border
	// It adds separation between the header and flyout
	const borderColor =
	colorMode === 'DARK'
	? shade(euiTheme.colors.emptyShade, 0.35)
	: shade(euiTheme.border.color, 0.03);

It appears to have been an intentional design decision by Caroline in #3538. It's likely due to the how shadows work in dark vs light mode, and the fact that the border is not noticeable in light mode and but becomes very noticeable in dark mode:

Dark	Dark After

vs light mode, which has a nice mix of both:

If we're fine having the border contrast/stand out from the shadow, this is a pretty easy fix/removal.

FWIW, when Elizabet was here, I believe she mentioned that our dark mode shades could use general improvement in that they don't play very well with shadows (it's harder to go darker than absolute black). I'm not sure if that's something the designers would be interested in generally taking a look at and improving.

[ek-so]

Hey @gvnmagni @MichaelMarcialis @ryankeairns please share your thoughts! Like I said, I'm personally fine with "Dark after" that @cee-chen suggested above, at least for now.

As for the shadows and grey shades in general — that's right, we can't go darker than black in dark mode. We have almost all possible shades (namely 28, from a very light to a very dark grey) in the upcoming palette refresh, so I believe we can support any solution we want to introduce. We might even want to remove this shadow under a top bar entirely, coz we are generally moving into more "flat" direction. But for now I'd leave it as is and say, let border contrast with the shadow in dark mode, imo.

[gvnmagni]

Absolutely fine to go with Dark After solution proposed to me 👍
Thank you for investigating this, I didn't know it would be so articulate

[cee-chen]

#8070

[MichaelMarcialis]

I'm good with the "Dark After" approach as well.