Our docs should be more beautiful

Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Mon Jul 18 08:56:29 PDT 2016


I was proofreading 
http://dtest.thecybershadow.net/artifact/website-f26d7179b8449e89e1961391fde9f221813c707c-04d0496c2d8cecedc4d75c919646d564/web/phobos-prerelease/std_experimental_checkedint.html 
and there are a few ways in which our docs could look better.

* My pet dream was to work on a project with a beautiful justified and 
hyphenated website. After endless debates, ugliness has won - I'm 
looking at a eye-scratching ragged right edge.

* The constraint on "struct Checked" is not formatted the same as the 
other constraints.

* Vertical spacing is just too fluffy. Looking e.g. at the docs for 
"Payload" and "hook" - each has a short description. The vspace between 
definition and description is too tall. The vspace between the 
description and the next definition is too tall. The grayed space within 
which the definition itself sits has too large up and bottom margins. 
The vspace above "Jump to:" is too high. Literally all vertical spacing 
is larger than it should be.

* The red vertical line on the left of each definition is meh. There's a 
bit more sense for struct definitions because of the "Jump to:" real 
estate. But for each little one-line definition, the red bar is just 
odd. Also, there is no change in color as indentation goes in (which 
would be a useful cue for long struct definitions).

* I don't see a point to the boxes within which each definition + its 
comments sits. Then there's one more box for the example! Boxes, boxes 
everywhere, and nary a drop to drink. They'd make sense e.g. if one 
could collapse a box. As such - hey, they just add more vspace :o).

* The vspace between the ditto'ed definitions "enum auto min;" and "enum 
auto max;" is again too large.

* The grayed out constraints are also indented horizontally - by a lot. 
If they're already distinguished by color, no need to indent them. Oh, 
then I saw if you hover you see "Constraints: " written in the space 
that seem to be indentation. Could we format that in non-code font at least?

* Spacing between doc paragraphs (see e.g. doc of opCast) seems to be 
80% line height. Should be 50%.

* The enumerated items (see doc of opChecked) seem to be the only 
artifact that's properly spaced vertically. I guess nobody discovered 
them so they're at the system default.

* "0 Contributors" should not be displayed at the bottom if there are no 
contributors. But I assume that's only the case before the pull is merged?


Andrei


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