x/pkgsite: rethink module page

[tooolbox]

What is the URL of the page with the issue?

https://pkg.go.dev/mod/github.com/jinzhu/gorm

What is your user agent?

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.149 Safari/537.36

Screenshot

What did you do?

Visited the page.

What did you expect to see?

Useful information related to the module, somehow different than the package page.

(Or, nothing at all.)

What did you see instead?

• The "module" page contains a subset of the information in the root package--it has nothing new to offer.
• It's not visually differentiated from the "Overview" tab of a package page, so you can get confused about where you are.
• The primary link on the page is to itself?

Suggestions

• Take a moment to consider if this page type is needed at all, given that it doesn't seem to provide any value. (Of course, it could be made to provide value, which are my the next points.)
• The readme on the main Module page is applicable, suggest that it stays.
• The primary action above the fold could be links to the packages in the module. Those definitely shouldn't be hidden in one of the tabs. Prior art is GitHub which puts the files & directories above the readme, or Godoc where (if you have no actual code in the package) the subpackages take center stage (check out kubernetes).
• Suggest losing the self-referential link.
• Suggest losing the Source Code link; make the Readme header link to it, or stick the source URL next to the Readme header as a link.
• Suggest displaying the entire go.mod file above the Readme. Unsure if it would be the top item or underneath the package links.
• Suggest a stronger visual differentiation of the page. It would be an exaggeration, but not by much, to say that the easiest way to know you're on a Module page is by checking the URL for "mod". Suggest using different typesetting, layout, iconography, something. Having the go.mod file at the top would be a good indicator, but something in addition to that wouldn't go amiss.

On displaying the go.mod file, it has a lot of useful data, such as what Go version is expected and what all the dependencies are, including their exact versions, and any replacements used. Factually, it's the only data that is unique to a module as a unit. My suggestion is displaying it exactly as-is, in a code font, but make all of the module references into hyperlinks that take you to that module on pkg.go.dev at the referenced version (tag/commit/etc.). This would include any replace => directives.

Thanks!

[julieqiu]

Thanks for the feedback! We are planning to address this as part of an upcoming round of UX changes.

/cc @fflewddur

[julieqiu]

The module page has be deprecated, and updates can be found on beta.pkg.go.dev. See #41585 (comment) for details.

Closing this issue for #41586.