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Evidence — sidebar nav-tree marks only the current page active (not every item)

_includes/navigation/nav-tree.html computed the active state with:

{% assign is_active = page.url == item.url %}

Liquid's assign does not evaluate == — it stored the value of page.url (a non-empty, truthy string) and ignored == item.url. So {% if is_active %} was always true and every link in a curated _data/navigation sidebar rendered with the .active highlight, making it impossible to tell which page you were on. The fix replaces the three broken assigns (is_active, child_active, gc_active) with proper conditional assigns.

How this evidence was produced

The active state is decided server-side, so both states are real Jekyll builds of the same site (a consumer with a large curated nav tree — 19 groups + 200 children), with user_overrides disabled to isolate theme rendering: BEFORE with nav-tree.html reverted to origin/main, AFTER at this PR's HEAD. The count is aside.bd-sidebar .nav-tree .nav-tree-link.active in the raw HTML.

What each file shows

  • 01-before-all-active.png — the left sidebar on /docs/wargames/natas/. Every game group link is highlighted (.active): 219 of 219 nav-tree links active.
  • 02-after-single-active.png — the same page after the fix. Only the current page's link (Natas) is highlighted: 1 of 219 active.
  • metrics.json — the measured active/total counts per state.

Measured before → after

Route .nav-tree-link.active (before) (after)
/docs/wargames/natas/ 219 (every item) 1 (current page)

Regression guard: test/visual/features/sidebar-navigation.spec.js → "curated nav-tree marks only the current page active, not every item" asserts active <= 1 on a curated docs tree (fails against the pre-fix template, which marked active === total).