Documentation improvements

Jonas H. jonas at lophus.org
Sun Apr 8 07:41:42 PDT 2012


Hi everyone,

I decided to give D a try yesterday and had quite some trouble with the 
documentation.  I want to help improve the docs on dlang.org. Here are 
some ideas.

The top links in the left menu really should documentation.  Most people 
don't care about Acknowledgements, the Sitemap, D1, D2 changelog etc. 
What do you guys think about a navigation like this?

* About D
   - Features (list of features with syntax examples)
   - Why D (motivation/rationale, comparison, testimonials, ...)
* Documentation
   - Book (link to Amazon)
   - Language Reference [1]
   - Library Reference [2]
* Community [3]
* Development [4]

[1] The Language Reference is pretty good already but I think the formal 
grammar specifications should be replaced with syntax examples. You 
don't learn a language's grammar by studying it in EBNF (or whatever) 
but by looking at code.  We could still keep the specs at the bottom of 
the pages.

[2] Not much to complain here; I'd just group the modules by topic 
rather than alphabetically -- e.g. "Base" (array, algorithm, date/time, 
path, regex, string, I/O, functional), "Math", "Network", 
"Processes/Concurrency", "Formats" (compression/archives, json, ...), 
"Platforms", "Contracts/Traits", ...

[3] A link to the mailman site. I believe most developers have organized 
their workflow around email.

[4] That's where we can stick all the stuff I proposed to get rid of on 
top of the navigation (changelog, ack. etc)


I'd like to get some feedback on these ideas. If you like them, I'm 
happy to send some pull requests implementing the changes.

Jonas


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