I can’t believe a mostly text website that doesn’t scale well on mobile made it to production in this day and age. Was it worked on by a single person? Did no one review it and think of opening it on their mobile?
I’d even say it’s harder to make a text website NOT render well on mobile. Doesn’t HTML handle that by default, unless you use some freakishly long text without spaces?
Not every website's key metric is conversion of mobile users. I have never needed to read Ruby documentation on my phone. I'm glad they did not waste their time on unimportant stuff like mobile UX in this case.
Yea why the heck did they pick green? I get red can look like errors but I’m certain there’s a cheerful ruby red out there that would have worked as an accent color for Ruby’s documentation. Green just feels so wrong to me for Ruby.
It’s some kind of Mandela/Berenstain effect because the old one is also slightly green but I don’t remember Ruby’s documentation ever being green and apparently nobody else did either.
I blame what I'll call the Art Teacher's Fallacy: "Pure black does not exist in nature, therefore you must never use pure black." This is equivocating on the meaning of "pure black"; your paints or computer screen also exist in nature and are therefore not "pure black" in the former sense.
In print, people went to great lengths to get the highest contrast possible. I see no reason why we shouldn't do the same on screen.
Nothing like making green the primary color on your "Ruby" website and spending zero minutes checking it on mobile to notice that every page horizontally scrolls.
If you thought it used to be red, you are probably thinking either of ruby-doc.org, which is an unofficial third-party site (but is older than docs.ruby-lang.org), or of the Rails docs.
This seems to be a reskin of the prior RDoc styles, which are visible in prior Ruby versions (e.g https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.3/). Despite the rather bold green, the overall look of the primary content feels very subdued. I think a big part of it is how low-contrast the code blocks are. In the prior style, code blocks used a pretty high-contrast syntax highlighting scheme; comments were very distinct, which is important as these demonstrate return values. In the new style, it's quite difficult to distinguish comments (medium gray) from identifiers (dark gray).
Personally I prefer the look of rubyapi.org over either of the official ones, but this new one kinda feels like a step backward from the prior one.
The rails api docs are also going through a redesign, you can see a preview of the next design in edge: https://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveJob.html
I think it’s a a change in the right direction that removes the “aggressive wall of text” on longer pages and looks great in dark and light modes.
There are a lot of odd choices here. Is there a mailing list thread or something where this was worked out? I couldn't seem to find one on a quick scan, but I don't know where these discussions happen these days.
I really don't want to assume incompetence or ignorance at all since I'm sure someone worked really hard on this. But I'm genuinely puzzled by a lot of what's going on.
Accessibility-wise it has problems. Font-size, colour, contrast to name a few. And overuse of bold. When everything has emphasis, nothing does.
And green? How did that get approved?
I'm glad things are still moving in the Ruby community. I use it every day. But Elixir is winning the mind-share battle over Ruby at $dayjob these days. And their documents is second to none. One of the best that I've used.
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It doesn’t work very well on mobile. Though, I’m not sure that the old one did either.
There’s too much white space. Documentation should be compact so that you can fit as much as possible on the screen while remaining legible.
The colour.
I’d even say it’s harder to make a text website NOT render well on mobile. Doesn’t HTML handle that by default, unless you use some freakishly long text without spaces?
I can. This is pretty typical.
Yea why the heck did they pick green? I get red can look like errors but I’m certain there’s a cheerful ruby red out there that would have worked as an accent color for Ruby’s documentation. Green just feels so wrong to me for Ruby.
[1]: https://www.ruby-lang.org/fr/
The goal was to move in the right direction, but make it similar enough that it would get quick approval without rocking the boat much (yet).
In print, people went to great lengths to get the highest contrast possible. I see no reason why we shouldn't do the same on screen.
You probably don't remember because you have not needed to read Ruby documentation on mobile. Good news though -- I suspect you are not alone in this.
I would expect 95% of the user base to be reading these docs on a laptop or desktop.
If you thought it used to be red, you are probably thinking either of ruby-doc.org, which is an unofficial third-party site (but is older than docs.ruby-lang.org), or of the Rails docs.
Random example: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/ARGF.html#method-i-each
Love the new colour scheme, easy to read (on desktop) and feels more chill than reds and greys.
The main font is very thin light gray font to begin with that makes it very hard to read even on a 4k monitor
Personally I prefer the look of rubyapi.org over either of the official ones, but this new one kinda feels like a step backward from the prior one.
That one's a bit too much red for my taste :) There's a sweet spot to find that's closer to "nice accent colors" than "aggressive red wall of text"
I really don't want to assume incompetence or ignorance at all since I'm sure someone worked really hard on this. But I'm genuinely puzzled by a lot of what's going on.
And green? How did that get approved?
I'm glad things are still moving in the Ruby community. I use it every day. But Elixir is winning the mind-share battle over Ruby at $dayjob these days. And their documents is second to none. One of the best that I've used.