GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 448879
Use a footer when generating HTML documentation
Last modified: 2009-01-26 08:38:28 UTC
Each HTML page should have some kind of footer to prevent scrolling from "breaking." The content of the footer doesn't matter, half a screen full of whitespace would be enough. Table of contents pages for example, feels fairly weird when they end right after the last line of the contents.
How does adding excess space after the page make scrolling *better*?
It make scrolling down more predictable. Your eye focus is normally at the upper half of the screen and it feels awkward and is unexpected to have to move eye focus to read the page fully. It's hard for me to explain in English but it is a very common web design technique. It also fixes anchor links, like this one: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gconf/gconf-gconf-schema.html#gconf-schema-set-list-type
I've always found the problem with anchors annoying, so I'd like to add something at the bottom of the pages just to fix that. I'd actually like to see a navigation bar at the bottom as well, containing the arrows just like the top navigation bar.
For me the html from commant #2 looks fine. Having the navigation bar repeated below is a bit redundant. Damon, do you also what it fixed (not scolling). I agree that it would be good to have some sort of EOF thingy as right now there is no obvious sign that the page in not truncated.
The problem is that when you jump to an anchor you expect that text to be at the top of the window. But in the example in #2 it appears at the bottom, so you have to scan through all the text to find it. I'd like the bottom navigation bar to scroll rather than be fixed. It is useful for when you use the scrollbar to scroll to the bottom of the page. You would only have to move the mouse a small distance to click on the arrow button to go to the next page.
Björn, how much is a half screen of whitespaces? Anything we can do with CSS here. I don't like the idea of putting a emptry programmlisting tag at the end of each page. Repeating the top-level navigation as non-fixed block would only help a bit. Would you find that useful?
Created attachment 93705 [details] add blank space at the bottom Could you try the attached stylesheet? I also have a patch that adds a final <hr> so that the last entry is somewhat terminated before the space comes.
Thanks Stefan! Your patch solves the core issue and anchor links to the last item now shows up in the middle of the screen instead of at the bottom so thats a big usability improvement. Repeating the navigation bar would be nice too. Or a copyright statement or a line like "Document generated by gtk-doc 1.5.9", anything to make the footer longer, use your imagination. :)
Björn, I am happy that you like it. Its a hardcoded value (20em). I don't know if this is good, but probably better than nothing. Regarding the footer I need to have a closer look, as people can specify a custom footer for the docs. So I need to figure if they might want both (first gtk-doc-nav, then theirs) or only theirs.
2007-08-21 Stefan Kost <ensonic@users.sf.net> * gtkdoc-mkdb.in: * style.css: Add divider and empty space at the bottom. Mostly fixes #448879.
<refsect1><refsect2 /><refsect2 /></refsect1> at the end of document create referable output elements with get auto-generated ids from xsltproc, hindering the fix of bug 365913. So, I would prefer a less hackish solution.
Adding blocks bug 365913. The bug itself does not block it, but the committed patch does.
2007-11-11 Stefan Kost <ensonic@users.sf.net> * gtk-doc.xsl: * gtkdoc-mkdb.in: * style.css: Alternative and cleaner footer implementation (unblock #365913).
Björn, is that fine now or should we keep this open?
Please reopen, if your not happy with it yet.