From: Douglas Livingstone Date: 2005-01-21T15:05:43+09:00 Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 14:21:39 +0900, James Britt wrote: > I also hope others speak up on what the do or don't like; I've asked > this on previous occasions, but typically get very little response, so > it is hard to tell what works and what doesn't. When I look at the ruby-doc index page (http://www.ruby-doc.org/) I just have an overriding urge to tear apart the design. I want to shove the mailing list info in a box and get it outof the way. I want to delete all those dots in the menu, and those square brackets. I want to remove the massive letter spacing in the ruby-doc title, make it at least legable. I just want to plain delete things like "Below are web log entries with news and announcements concerning documentation efforts." Like you say, somethings might be useful the first time you see a page, but after that they just get in the way. "URL-based Documentation Queries". Cool. Read it once, then use or forget. Give it a link in a column, get it out of my way. The news items. Massive areas of white space, do you really need 3em of space between each line of text?? "Ruby 1.8.2 Final Release"? I thought this was "complete and accurate documentation" not "latest Ruby news blog". "Style"?? At most, four little "A"s like http://wired.com/. A whole 200x300 box is just a wast of scrollbar space. "Downloads"?? Cool, but that's what the downloads page is for. If something new gets put in the downloads, post a news item. Otherwise why bother with both. "Online Resources", "Articles", "RSS Feeds" - all cool, but what are they doing in the side bar?? No one will see them 3000px down the page. "Third-party API Docs" - cool, but why not just put them with the rest of the API docs? "Tools" - again, cool, but they aren't doing any good where they are. List them on a "how to work with the documentation" page if you must. "Currently Available Ruby Books" - yep, I saw "Bookstore" complete with dots and square brackets in the menu... if I wanted books, I would have used the menu, not scrolled down 10000px first and thought "ooh, a list f some books!" And what is news from Sat, 9 Oct 2004 doing on the front page? If it is useful content, make a section for it. If it isn't, shove it in an archive so some historian can look at it in a hundred years time and think how far we've come. "Colophon" - more of that annoying letter spacing. Hell, this is all just the front page. I've not even gotten onto what annoys me about the content of the site itself. Half the problem is that I haven't already. The thing should be running off site wide templates, or atleast try and pretend to be on the same URL. It's worse than the W3C. At least they make things easy to read. "Blogtari! is written in Ruby, an interpreted object-oriented language." If I've got this far down the page and I don't know that already, nothing will save me. And if I cared what language "Blogtari" (silly name) was written in, I would have clicked the Blogtari! link already. And as this seems to be a time for pointing out broken links and general disrepair, that link at the top of the page to the mailing list archives? 404 Not Found.