Why are some theme-specific HTML elements (with CSS classes) inserted?

Details

The file https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/blob/master/readthedocs/core/static/core/js/readthedocs-doc-embed.js contains some JavaScript code that inserts a bunch of HTML elements with CSS classes, for example:

<div class='wy-table-responsive'></div>

It looks like this is used in the sphinx_rtd_theme, but there is a separate JS file over there: https://github.com/readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme/blob/71d6d182cfeb7872c2399eac4a47d2f3c6b2c7d1/src/theme.js#L102-L103

Why is this theme-specific manipulation done, even if another theme is used?

Expected Result

No HTML/CSS manipulations unless they are related to the RTD-specific site components.

Especially no theme-specific manipulations.

Actual Result

Site elements that are not provided by RTD (e.g. tables in the main content) are manipulated.

[stsewd]

should this issue be closed and tracked directly in https://github.com/readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme/issues/1239 instead?

This problem needs to be fixed in both sides. We are calling code from the theme from our side and the theme has rtd specific code.

[agjohnson]

The underlying issue is that we are calling enable() on the theme exported code (for badge only flyout on non-sphinx-rtd-theme themes), but there is sphinx-rtd-theme specific code in the theme’s init() function.

There are several calls that happen in the theme init() (called by the theme’s enable() function) related to table display, and those should only happen when the the theme used by sphinx is a derivative of sphinx_rtd_theme. I believe these calls are:

https://github.com/readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme/blob/71d6d182cfeb7872c2399eac4a47d2f3c6b2c7d1/src/theme.js#L101-L123

We don’t have a way to turn this off currently. A feature flag doesn’t quite solve this, there are some functions in there specifically for the badge only version of the flyout that are valid, but the table selector calls are definitely not required for all themes.

The best options are probably to resolve this in sphinx_rtd_theme 1.0.1/1.1.0, alter how we are calling the theme code from RTD embed.js, or both in some fashion most likely.