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

[Simon Marlow]

On 06/08/10 03:15, Jeff Zaroyko wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 11:48 PM, Johan Tibell<johan.tibell at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Dino Morelli<dino at ui3.info>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, 4 Aug 2010, Mark Lentczner 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?
>>
>> Yes. There's research suggesting that the line length should be between 65
>> and 75 characters per line.
>> http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/42/text_length.htm
>>
>
> http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLength.asp
>
> "This study examined the effects of line length on reading speed,
> comprehension, and user satisfaction of online news articles."
>
> I completely agree with the case of news articles, but not in the case
> of Haskell documentation, it's structured differently and different
> parts such as bold or larger typeface serve as points of reference
> when reading, in contrast to plain old paragraphs found in a news
> article.
>
> The current layout works very well for me, I don't like the additional
> whitespace in the proposed version.   I feel the colour scheme is a
> step backwards from what we have already, which offers high
> visibility.

Personally I think the way the current layout expands to the full width 
of the window makes it really hard to read with a wide browser, but 
since many sites suffer from the same problem I normally use a narrower 
browser window and fill up the rest of the screen space with IRC windows :-)

The great thing about the Haddock redesign is that the content has been 
separated from the style.  If opinions about the style are sufficiently 
divided we can provide a style switcher on the docs we ship with GHC, 
and make that the default for Cabal-generated docs.  Although the 
opinions I've seen so far suggest that the majority of people prefer the 
new style.

Cheers,
	Simon