2012-02-21

Valadoc website renewal

The valadoc website for unstable packages gets renewed:
  • A fast search for looking up symbols
  • Tooltips to read signature and short descriptions of symbols without leaving the page
  • Ajax loading of the web pages
  • It has a slightly new look that resembles gnome.org
Planned features:
  • Comments by the community, for sharing experience and examples
  • Proper syntax highlighting
This new version will be soon available for stable packages as well.

Valadoc is a tool for generating documentation for Vala projects and external projects featuring a GIR file, and much more.

7 comments:

  1. That is some beautiful work. Strangely, one of my favourite parts of Vala is valadoc.org: I think consistent, centralized documentation is something we're really missing that makes a platform easy to understand, and this is turning out very well!

    Some thoughts:

    The Search text field aligns weirdly with the top navigation bar. It's positioned higher than it, and a bit taller. Just feels a little jumbly to me, and the big Clear icon adds to that effect. Perhaps a smaller font and a little more padding on the top would help?

    The way you have scrollbars set up makes this site unusable on tablets and phones (because Webkit on mobile treats overflow:scroll effectively the same as overflow:hidden), and it also means the little scroll indicators don't appear when I search for text in Chrome. As a rule of thumb, I like to consider the body tag's scrollbar a very special thing that shouldn't be trifled with :)
    Perhaps you could make the entire page scrollbable then find a way to make the search pane, specifically, scrollable on its own. I know it isn't ideal, but you can have that follow the top of the window with position:fixed (and height:100%), or use one of the more sophisticated jquery plugins (like scrollfollow) for doing the same thing.
    With that approach, it can degrade a lot more gracefully.

    I love that the search field focuses when I move my mouse to the left side, and search works really well!

    Should the API-References link in the header be in its active state when I'm looking at the landing page?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. About the search box, I'd rather attach the dark bar more to the top, like live.gnome.org .

      About the scrolling issue, how would you make the sidebar scroll as you suggested then? Apart the fact that I think it's first a webkit issue to ignore scroll on touch screens.

      In theory, the links on the top should have to be highlighted the same way as in gnome.org, yes.

      Delete
    2. About the scroll issue, this might be interesting: http://chris-barr.com/index.php/entry/scrolling_a_overflowauto_element_on_a_touch_screen_device/

      Delete
  2. Why wouldn't Vala just integrate with http://sphinx.pocoo.org ? It will give you nice documentation abilities, generation, design, indexing/searching, http://readthedocs.org integration etc.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's interesting k_bx, but what's wrong with the new search? I believe that's way better than sphinx.pocoo provides. About documentation, generation, etc., well it's already there, why should we switch?

    ReplyDelete
  4. The doc page for a method should has a link back to its class at the top of page. As well as for functions, classes, etc should have links goes back to their packages.

    Hierarchy should always be shown for each and every items.

    When I searching for
    a method, once I reach the target, I cannot go up to the corresponding class page to have an overview over the class.

    Otherwise, nice work!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi, if you clear the search field (by pressing Escape for example), you see the hierarchy on the left. Does that work for you?

    ReplyDelete