fix(sidebar): highlight nearest ancestor item

[markdumay]

Problem

Navigating to a page that has no sidebar entry of its own leaves the sidebar completely inert — no active item, no aria-current, and every group collapsed. Nothing is highlighted at all.

Sidebar markup is rendered once per (section, version, language, variant) and cached, so the active item is resolved client side by assets/js/critical/sidebar-active.js. That matcher only treated a link as an ancestor candidate if it carried data-sidebar-match="prefix". Only the L1-only mode (level-min <= 1, level-max == 1) emits that attribute; the default full-tree mode never does. So in the full-tree sidebar there were no ancestor candidates at all, and a page missing from the menu matched nothing.

Pages built with build.list = never, and pages generated by a content adapter, are excluded from the page collections assets/live-pages.html builds the menu from. They can never have an entry of their own, so they always land on this path.

Reproduced on a docs site whose CLI reference is generated by a content adapter: on /docs/reference/command-line/version/ the built page had 0 active links, 0 aria-current, 0 expanded groups, and 0 prefix-capable links across both nav instances — while the /docs/reference/command-line/ link was present in the markup the whole time.

Fix

1. fix(sidebar): highlight nearest ancestor item

Exact match still wins outright. Only when no link matches exactly does the longest link that is a path ancestor of the current page take over, flagged aria-current="true" rather than "page". Ancestor matching compares against path + "/", so /docs/guides cannot claim /docs/guides-advanced/.

The brand logo is excluded from the candidates. It sits inside the <nav> and points at the site home, so under ancestor matching it would match every page below it. Verified necessary: without the guard, a page with no ancestor in the menu lights up the logo, and the home page marks it active.

2. refactor(sidebar): drop dead prefix-match markup

With ancestor matching derived from the href, nothing reads data-sidebar-match="prefix" any more — not the script, not the stylesheets, not the docs. Removes the attribute and the prefixMatch argument threading it through the inline item partial. Rendered markup loses one attribute and is otherwise unchanged.

Verification

Check	Result
Reported page, before	0 active links, 0 aria-current, 0 expanded groups
Reported page, after	correct item active, aria-current="true", parent group expanded, link visible — both navs
exampleSite, all 62 sidebar pages x 2 navs	124/124 identical before vs. after — no regressions
exampleSite, before vs. after the dead-code strip	identical result digest across all 62 pages
data-sidebar-match in built HTML after strip	0 occurrences
pnpm test (eslint, stylelint, markdownlint, template build)	passes

Note

There is no standing automated coverage for this: the repo has no JS unit harness (pnpm test is lint plus a Hugo template build), and tests/visual/ has Playwright installed but no specs. Verification above was a one-off browser run over both builds. Happy to wire up a tests/visual/ spec in a follow-up if that is wanted.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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[markdumay]

🎉 This PR is included in version 3.19.2 🎉

The release is available on GitHub release

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