Improving the usability of Index

[Rufflewind]

I think it's better to just put everything on one page rather than on separate A, B, C … Z pages. Instead, each letter of the alphabet should simply be placed under its own heading, with a quick table of contents at the top for reference.

The rationale being that:

• Modern web browsers can easily handle these long index pages composed of basic HTML.

  For example, base takes ~50MB of RAM on Chromium x86-64, which is less than 1/3 of TweetDeck. The page itself is only ~500KB in size, which is tiny compared to the network bandwidth these days. (A more extreme case would be gl, which takes ~150MB of RAM and is ~4MB in size.)

• Having it all on one page makes it very easy to find things with Ctrl+F.

The second one would be less of an issue if there was a built-in search feature, but that's for another day.

[Fuuzetsu]

We already have an All page like so: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.8.0.0/docs/doc-index-All.html . Is that not satisfactory?

And yes, base is not really that big, it's stuff like gl and other mostly generated libraries that are the issue.

[Rufflewind]

Is that not satisfactory?

I am suggesting the removal of explicit pagination entirely. Paginating by the letter of the alphabet might make sense for printed media but is quite redundant for web pages. Instead, Index-All.html simply becomes the default landing page. The alphabetic links would still remain, but instead link to the respective portions of the full Index page, which is grouped by alphabet.

This is motivated by usability concerns: consider a user who wants to find a specific function in a library. The user would have to click [Index] on the module page, followed by the letter of interest, and then Ctrl+F one or two times to find the specific identifier. In contrast, with a single-page Index the user can often skip the second step entirely.

gl and other mostly generated libraries that are the issue.

Most Haskell libraries are small. There are exceptions of course, as you said, but they are rare and not insurmountable. In particular, the amount of memory used is still comparable to a complex web application. (Ironically, most of gl is split over F and G, so splitting it by alphabet only reduces by ~2.) I think it's better to improve usability the UI for the more frequent cases even if the rarer cases are slightly less performant (which only matters for the initial loading part).