Martin, I believe this issue was fixed in bug 1513500 since I am unable reproduce this in the latest Nightly with the steps you provided. Can you confirm if this is still happening to you?

The bug still reproduces, but the STR changed since #text nodes are now represented in a different way I guess.

New STR:

• visit https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1513502
• open devtools
• inspect the element #header-nav => item first, container second
• select a different element e.g. #header-search
• select #header-nav again => container first, item second

Hi Martin, according to bug 1496458 it looks like this behaviour is intentional. The other times the flex item pane is shown first is if the container+item is selected by:

• The dropdown at the top of the flex item pane.
• The listed entries of items in the flex container pane.
• Right clicking and inspecting the element

The only time the flex container pane is shown first is if it is selected through the markup view. However, I also noticed that selecting #header-nav by using the search bar will show the Flex Item first, which I’m not sure if this is what we want.

Let me know what you think about this.

Thanks for clarifying Micah! I didn't know this is intentional tbh.

I'm not sure why we make an exception when you select an item from the markup view. I think it would be more consistent to users when we always show item info first and container info second. It's hard to tell the intention of what a user actually wants to see by the way they are navigating :)

Micah, Victoria: What do you think?

Ah, this issue continues to be kind of mind-bending!

Re: your STR:

• When I navigate to header-nav inside Markup, I always see Container pane first. This seems correct to me.
• If I navigate to it via picker or context menu, I see Item first. This seems wrong to me.

This is my reasoning from before:

1. When selecting an Item-Container via Markup view: I think we should change the current behavior to show the Container pane first. It's the most relevant to the page overlay, which seems like the most helpful initial thing to know about a flex-related layout. The higher level overview of the container pane also seems like a more easily understandable first impression for users who aren't necessarily aware of Flex features yet.

2. When navigating to an Item-Container from within the Layout panel: We'd show the Item pane first, as we do now.

So my main reason to show container first when navigating from outside the Layout panel is to anchor on what the page overlay highlights. I think this will make more sense once we have the combined overlay/box model highlighter. Happy to chat more if this seems wrong to you.

Unassigning myself since I'm not actively working on this.