Description

This is the easiest to maintain workaround now available. Upstream continues to reject the value such a feature for accessibility.

Approaches evaluated:

• Previous CSS workaround has become a maintenance burden to adapt (becomes very verbose to support deploy/preview/dev environments).
• An unofficial approach via redirect template as a workaround has a bad UX (at least when tested locally) as it loads a placeholder page for the sole purpose of redirecting via a separate HTML document, just to display an icon 🙄
• A similar approach to the current CSS was available, but requires to be a paid sponsor of the project until they reach $20k monthly funding milestone. That is $7k away and I doubt anyone here is interested in $15/month perpetually for a fix.
• The final alternative suggested that is minimal effort is a bit ugly, and the chosen solution going forward. The mkdocs.yml file gets some raw HTML included into the two external nav links, this just adds a span element to include a class of our own that we can reference in CSS.

Fixes #3822

Another alternative that was suggested by the primary mkdocs-material dev is to disable Instant Navigation feature, since that is what broke our current CSS by removing the relative URLs at runtime on the client (browser).

Type of change

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)

Checklist:

• My code follows the style guidelines of this project
• I have performed a self-review of my own code
• I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas
• I have added information about changes made in this PR to CHANGELOG.md

I don't think this needs a changelog entry?