Re: Usability ideas: text width and headers that are links - Mailing list pgsql-docs

From Niels Bom
Subject Re: Usability ideas: text width and headers that are links
Date
Msg-id f3275687-5902-4637-b53b-1f2740e5a732@app.fastmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Usability ideas: text width and headers that are links  ("Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz@postgresql.org>)
Responses Re: Usability ideas: text width and headers that are links  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>)
List pgsql-docs
On Fri, Oct 21, 2022, at 17:42, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks for the suggestions. Comments inline:
>
> On 10/21/22 9:54 AM, Niels Bom wrote:
>> Hi!
>> 
>> I have 2 small ideas to improve the usability of the PostgreSQL documentation. I'm looking at v15 (1) mostly.
>> 
>> Idea 1:
>> Give the text width of the main content a max width.
>
> Why? Can you please provide examples? Screenshots are OK.

Setting a max-width on regular textual content is good for readability, which in turn increases accessibility. See this
W3Ca11y documentation (1) and an a11y page by the US government (2) for more detailed info.
 

Using the CSS max-width property makes narrower sizes possible (for smaller screens) but sets an upper limit. The newer
`ch`unit in CSS is a good-enough approximation of the average width of a character. I've seen 66ch as the "ideal" width
forregular text. For the docs code examples need to have enough width too of course. But we can have those be wider
thantheir containing element if need be.
 

1: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/page-structure/styling/
2: https://accessibility.digital.gov/visual-design/typography/

>
>> Idea 2:
>> Each h3 and h4 element should be a link pointing to the nearest parent section with an id. This makes deeplinking to
specificparts of a page easier. This prevents people from having to scroll to the top, find out which
table-of-content-linkthey have to click to get the deeplink of where they wanted to link. This is actually quite a
commonpattern. See the Python docs (2) and the Mozilla docs (3) as examples. The pattern on those sites is even a
littlenicer by showing an icon on hover.
 
>
> This has been on my backlog for awhile, i.e. to have the hovering 
> "anchor holders". I'll try to move it up on the list.
Cool! I could help if you want to.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jonathan
>
>
> Attachments:
> * OpenPGP_signature



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