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

On 06/08/10 03:15, Jeff Zaroyko wrote:

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 11:48 PM, Johan Tibell wrote:

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On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Dino Morelli wrote:

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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