Usability ideas: text width and headers that are links

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.

Idea 2:
Each h3 and h4 element should be a link pointing to the nearest parent section with an id. This makes deeplinking to specific parts of a page easier. This prevents people from having to scroll to the top, find out which table-of-content-link they have to click to get the deeplink of where they wanted to link. This is actually quite a common pattern. See the Python docs (2) and the Mozilla docs (3) as examples. The pattern on those sites is even a little nicer 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.

Thanks,

Jonathan

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 W3C a11y 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 for regular text. For the docs code examples need to have enough width too of course. But we can have those be wider than their 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 specific parts of a page easier. This prevents people from having to scroll to the top, find out which table-of-content-link they have to click to get the deeplink of where they wanted to link. This is actually quite a common pattern. See the Python docs (2) and the Mozilla docs (3) as examples. The pattern on those sites is even a little nicer 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.

On 2022-Oct-21, Niels Bom wrote:

Setting a max-width on regular textual content is good for
readability, which in turn increases accessibility. See this W3C a11y
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 for regular text. For the docs
code examples need to have enough width too of course. But we can have
those be wider than their containing element if need be.

+1 for this idea. (I often open multiple windows just so that I end up
with the right width in the one containing text to read, as a substitute
for this.)

This should definitely only apply to running text, not code examples,
synopses, tables, etc; otherwise it's going to be *very* bothersome.

--
Álvaro Herrera 48°01'N 7°57'E — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
#error "Operator lives in the wrong universe"
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On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 1:41 AM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote:

On 2022-Oct-21, Niels Bom wrote:

Setting a max-width on regular textual content is good for
readability, which in turn increases accessibility. See this W3C a11y
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 for regular text. For the docs
code examples need to have enough width too of course. But we can have
those be wider than their containing element if need be.

+1 for this idea. (I often open multiple windows just so that I end up
with the right width in the one containing text to read, as a substitute
for this.)

For what it's worth, I've also often wished for a max-width on the
docs. Another +1.

66ch ends up rather stark, though: I think we should go with something
considerably wider.