[Doc-SIG] Re: [development doc updates]

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

On Wednesday 17 November 2004 04:26 am, Johannes Gijsbers wrote:
 > > - The document title is pushed all the way to the right.
 >
 > Shouldn't these two be the other way around? It feels rather unnatural
 > to have the document title on the right for someone who's grown up
 > reading left-to-right like me.

The idea would be that the first things on the page would be the navigation 
links, with "Next" (as the presumably most-used) being the first.  Some of 
these links were always in the lead position.

Having the title in the page head is more like the header on pages in a book; 
it's there for reference if you need it.  The title page still has the title 
big and centered.

 > I would also link to see a link to the Python Documentation Index in the
 > upper left corner. This is a bit of a standard, and even though I've
 > been using the Python docs for a couple of years, I still frequently

That would be nice.  I've been loathe to add more links, simply because more 
links requires more real-estate, that that something people haven't wanted to 
give up in the past.  (I remember the reaction when I made the top navigation 
stay in the browser window even as the user scrolled down; people wanted the 
screen real-estate for content so they could make the window small enough to 
show next to their editor.)

You can use the "Up" link to move out of the specific documents to the 
documentation index.

 > find myself looking for the non-existent link to the index. As Jakob
 > Nielsen likes to say, "People spend most of their time on *other*
 > websites".
 >
 > So, to summarize, I would like to see the navbar become like this:
 >
 > "Python Documentation > Python Library Reference    <navigation icons>"

I'll think about how to get these links in there.  It took me a moment to 
realize that you meant "the list of documents" rather than "the index of the 
current document."

 > > - Some of the spaces between page elements have been reduced slightly.
 >
 > This is about the 'letter-spacing: -x' declarations on the tt and
 > .keyword selectors, I think? If so, please take them out. They're far

I've removed the two attempts to control letter spacing; this is just too 
font-specific to keep.  The online version includes this change.

But the comment about page elements was actually about the spacing between the 
navigation icons and horizontal rules; there's simply less empty space there 
in the new style (very intentionally, to support the 
less-space-spent-on-navigation idea).


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>