On Monday 2002-07-08 14:23 -0700, Asa Dotzler wrote: > L. David Baron wrote: > <snip> > > I was maintaining / helping to > > maintain those sites as if they were prominent, only to discover later > > that my time was wasted because they were no longer easy to find. > > They were never easy to find. mozilla.org/docs/index.html is a > nightmare. It's almost completely useless.
How is http://mozilla.org/catalog/ any more useful? Yes, the docs index has a lot of links, but catalog has more, and they're better hidden. > Maybe layers below that are better but that's the entry point that's > less prominent now and with good reason; it sucked. The new entry point sucks even more, I claim, since it doesn't direct users to any index pages maintained by the people who know what they're talking about. The CSS page links to a bunch of things that are very low-quality and error-ridden. The layout documentation page tries to duplicate http://mozilla.org/newlayout/doc/ (which is up to date) rather than link to it. Furthermore, many of the sub-pages are quite sparse, and they can force a user to search through a bunch of levels to find things. Quick usability test: try to find the slides from alecf's introduction to XPCOM, starting from: http://mozilla.org/catalog/ http://mozilla.org/projects/ http://mozilla.org/docs/ (I wouldn't be as against deprecating docs and catalog entirely in favor of a slightly enhanced projects page that has pointers to build instructions, hacking guidelines, and perhaps one or two other things. However, I think the catalog moves docs in the wrong direction -- towards deeper listing rather than shallower.) -David -- L. David Baron <URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >
