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

[Jeff Zaroyko]

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.

Jeff