Useful links are hidden on developer docs

[ewiner]

Maybe this is just me - but in the developer docs (https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide), I find the CSS rule that only shows links when hovering over a paragraph to be annoying and confusing. I didn't know they were there at first, and now I have to move my mouse around as I read a page to know where I can find more information about a subject.

The hover rule certainly makes the page easier to read, but I find it to be counterproductive for its purpose as a reference material.

Happy to PR this change if necessary.

[harding]

@ewiner thanks for making an issue! The hidden-by-default internal links
are definitely a tradeoff, and we tried several different things
(including display-all-links) before settling on them.

I don't have a good sense about what the average reader feels---you're
the first person to file an issue about this or otherwise mention it
somewhere I've seen, but that doesn't mean other people haven't been
unhappy about it. (Perhaps we should have one of those unobtrusive
survey forms linked from this page... but that's another issue.)

For people with Javascript enabled, we could possibly provide a button
that toggles hidden-internal-links or displayed-internal-links. How
would you feel about that?

(That might also improve the experience on mobile devices where we
display all internal links due to the lack of a traditional
pointer device.)

Thanks again for making an issue, and sorry about any inconvenience.

David A. Harding

[saivann]

@ewiner Do you have a suggestion for a better compromise? Until we have a better idea, I think we should be prioritizing readability and consider these links an extra feature.

This being said, perhaps it would work better if all links in all paragraphs were made visible when hovering the page? See this live preview: http://bitcointest1.us.to/en/developer-guide

[harding]

@saivann I really like the all-links-visible when hovering over the
page. Maybe hovering over the page should also make the subheading
anchor link icons visible as well. Thanks for previewing this!

David A. Harding

[ewiner]

@saivann Yeah, hovering the page seems like a fine compromise, I'd be happy if you made that change permanent.

If you'd like to tweak it more - perhaps it's more important to highlight links to the Developer Reference than it is for links to the Developer Guide. That is, if I see listreceivedbyaccount mentioned, I'm much more likely to think "now what is that thing and how do I use it?" than I am if I see yet another reference to the word block.

[saivann]

@harding I think you are refering to anchor links affordance within titles on the page? That's an interesting idea but I just tested it and I'm not convinced it works quite well, I tend to prefer the existing GitHub ways of doing things.

[harding]

@saivann, yeah I was talking about the anchor link affordance. Thanks
for testing it (and sorry it was a bust).

The commit you just pushed looks very nice. Thanks!

David A. Harding

[saivann]

@harding Thanks!