L. David Baron wrote: > 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.
That's a bug. It should be fixed. Let's fix it. The CSS page links to a bunch of things that are very > low-quality and error-ridden. I'd love to see people make this better. The catalog/ is just the docs/ listing copied into a new format with more links added. In an ideal world we'd have a system that let you view a massive flat list or a catalog view from the same data. Right now they're both maintained by hand and that sucks for both of them. I still think catalog makes a lot more sense if it's done well. Maybe it just needs some help from the experts (not that the experts were making /docs any better). The layout documentation page tries to > duplicate http://mozilla.org/newlayout/doc/ (which is up to date) rather > than link to it. That's a bug. It should link to it. (I see no reason not to duplicate it though since I don't care to read about the links as it is layed out at newlayout/doc/. I just want the link in it's proper catagory. 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. This should be improved. catalog already has more sources of information linked up than /docs/ and it will be even more useful when it gets more links. > > 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/ Quick usability test: try to find embedding docs starting from: http://mozilla.org/catalog/ http://mozilla.org/docs/ We suck wherever you look. I think a well organized catalog is a better format that a big fat megalist like we currently have at docs/ but in the end if they're both well done then they're just 2 different views on the same data. > > (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.) > It's a catalog, not the actual documentation. I think that some people will prefer a single page with 500 links each matched with paragraph of information about what you might find if you follow that link (m.o/docs/) and others will prefer a dmoz/yahoo style catalog-directory thing view. I prefer the second. You seem to prefer the first. Let's make a system where both are different views on the same data and everyone's happy. --Asa
