Zoom mode: detach from content only

[ramonjd]

Dependent upon #71512

Once patterns in contentOnly is accepted as working as intended, decouple zoom-out from editing behaviour. Zoom mode just zooms/scales.

Zoom mode should be exclusively about scaling the view (like Cmd + - in a browser).

This then necessarily implies the untangling and removal of all the section block selectors and conditions, pattern insertion, zoom out separators et. al., so that the editing experience is the same whether you’re zoomed in or zoomed out.

Sub tasks:

• Identify and remove old/unused related APIs, e.g., getSectionRootBlock/hasSectionRootClientId

Related

• Writing and contentOnly modes #60021 (comment)

[andrewserong]

Thanks for adding me as an assignee! I'm keen to work on this one. Just a heads-up to anyone reading that I'll be AFK next week (back on Oct 20). So feel free to jump into this one if anyone else would like to collaborate or work on it (the work's happening so far over in #71807).

[andrewserong]

Update: the exploratory PR in #71807 mostly works pretty well. After chatting to a couple of folks about how it should ideally work, my take is that it would be good to pause this for now, and revisit it once the contentOnly mode has advanced a little further and been stabilised (tracking issue in #71517). I'll unassign myself for now.

In principle, for Zoom Out to not do anything other than zooming out, then we'd likely want the following to be in place:

• Make sure the affordances that we have in Zoom Out are good and useful while zoomed in, so that they can be decoupled from the zoom state (and be more useful!) — i.e. shuffling styles, shuffling design, etc.
• Dig into what “change design” means a little more — we know it can be useful, but making it feel that way is going to need some more investigation. Right now it can feel rough or jarring since it completely swaps out the pattern.
• Similarly, settle on how we’d like the behaviour for rearranging blocks to feel while zoomed in. Zoom Out currently displaces items, and when we're zoomed in, we use the drop indicator line. Ideally we'd use the same approach in both places, rather than Zoom Out changing things.

Once we’re in a place where we’re settled on the interactions for rearranging blocks, contentOnly mode, and the affordances that are currently tied to Zoom Out, we can refresh the PR #71807 (or re-do it) and progress on decoupling.

TL;DR — before picking this up again, let's stabilise the contentOnly feature.