[documentation] Navegability in Drupal documentation

[Charlie Lowe]

sime wrote:
> 
> the best on-line 
> documentation I've used is at php.net.

This is sort of a seque, but I think this is one positive thing about 
the Drupal handbooks: the comments. Both php.net and mysql.com provide 
user comments along with their manual pages, something that many other 
documentation sites do not. This is an advantage in that anyone can 
contribute fixes and alternate solutions.

But since Luiz brought up the subject, here are some navigation issues 
that might be worth considering:

1) Theme issues. I know that there are plans to update drupal.org's 
theme for 4.8, so we might think of recommendations which would increase 
usability for the handbooks. For instance, and this may be an issue for 
much of the site (not just the handbooks), there is a lack of visual 
contrast to weight the importance of page elements: everything is blue 
and all blocks are the same graphical design, color, and font size.

Some sort of contrast in design which makes more important things stand 
our more would probably aid in using the handbooks. For example, my 
course website:

http://joe.english.purdue.edu/su06/lowe8/coursebook

The left column is for blocks that appear on all pages (e.g., the 
navigation block). The right column is for blocks that appear on 
specific pages--in this instance, the book navigation--and the styling 
is different from the left column.

2) I've been wondering if we aren't adding too much noise to book 
navigation with the various methods of moving through a book. On this page--

http://drupal.org/node/43767

--which do I choose as a newbie book user? The TOC block on the left, 
the immediate child page list underneath ("Installing Drupal", 
"Installing multisite . . .", etc.), or the prev/next/up options 
underneath that? At first I liked the titles in place of "prev" and 
"next" which were included in 4.7, but I'm starting to wonder if this is 
not too much, less being more in terms of usability? Why do users need 
so many redundant choices? I'm guessing that the book might be easier to 
use if the immediate list of child pages was removed and we went back to 
the "prev," "next," and "up" only without the titles (which often appear 
messy and cramped because of their length).