[Haskell-cafe] Preview the new haddock look and take a short survey

[Dino Morelli]

On Fri, 6 Aug 2010, Ben Millwood wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Dino Morelli <dino at ui3.info> wrote:
>>
>> One thing I haven't seen anyone else comment on is the width of the new
>> docs. I have a large (26") monitor and use the browser full-screen (with
>> xmonad, so even more screen space). When I load these pages, particularly
>> the non-frame one, something like 50% of my screen real-estate is empty
>> whitespace on either side of the doc content. There is also wasted space
>> in the frames version, just a little less of it. I wish the docs were
>> using that space like the current Haddock does. Is the plan to use a
>> fixed width like this?
>>
>> Please say no, it's a disappointing trend that you see everywhere. Like
>> Twitter's web interface, for instance, very narrow.
>>
>
> Yeah, I wrote about this in my survey response. It seems to me that if
> I find text in a narrow page more readable, I can easily just resize
> my browser window, this doesn't need to be enforced by the webpage
> itself.

Agreed, it's like a premature optimization for the Haddock page build to
decide and enforce width without knowing my needs, hardware or windowing
situation.


> I'm also not so enthusiastic about tabbed synposis. I'm not convinced
> you can easily use the synopsis and doc text simultaneously, so I
> don't see any reason for it to be apart from the text body. Simplicity
> is a virtue :)

The more I play with it, the more I'm not that thrilled with the sliding
synopsys thing as well. I think moving away from static pages is making
the docs less usable.

There was a period of time when the simple static alphabetic function
index was replaced with some dynamic JavaScript filtering that responded
to keystrokes in the edit control. It performed really terribly on even
my very modern systems with Firefox. I was happy when it went away. I
appreciate the idea, but it pays to be very very conservative with
reference material.


> I do think that in terms of colours, fonts etc. it's prettier, but the
> fixed max width and kind of gimmicky synopsis tab are steps backward
> in my opinion.

I can agree with this too. I like the existing higher-contrast coloring
more, which was also mentioned by a couple of the other responses in
this thread.


-- 
Dino Morelli  email: dino at ui3.info  web: http://ui3.info/d/  irc: dino-
pubkey: http://ui3.info/d/dino-4AA4F02D-pub.gpg  twitter: dino8352