As one of those people who complained about the HTML output of DocBook recently, it’s good to see Shaun kickstarting some progress on this.
I think my main concern with those mockups is the line length… in English, ten words is about the most you can fit on a line before reading speed slows down. This isn’t so much of an issue for stuff that turns up in help browsers, as the narrow width of the window naturally restricts this anyway, but it’s a problem for things like the HIG that are normally read in a web browser. I’ve tried to deal with this in the draft HIG’s stylesheet recently by indenting the body text from both sides of the page, which also makes it easier to pick out headers. (Example)
My main gripe with the HTML version of large DocBook documents, though, is the lack of a navigation sidebar. Things like the HIG are a pain in the bahookie to jump around, when every other major online styleguide (Mac, WIndows, Java) makes it simple.
Should be installed by default for any browser: http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/linktoolbar
It’s not that hard to generate decent navigation for Docbook.
http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/xslt-benchmarks.html or http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/automatic-proxy.html shows you what can be done with a little bit of effort. I realise it isn’t much, but it allows you to navigation through the document fairly easily.
Compare those to http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/gcj-automake.html which is the default nwalsh xhtml output.
For restricting the width of the text, you almost certainly want to use CSS’s max-width attribute, with a relative width:
body { max-width: 40em; }
It doesn’t work with most versions of IE, I’m told, but hey, at some point one stops caring. Someone with time on their hands could use one of the tricks to enable that only for non-IE, and use a plain width attribute for IE only.
Calum, can you please provide a pointer to a study or usability website or similar, that backs up your statement about readability/reading speed and line length/word count?
Here’s one such study, which concludes that a line length of 65-75 characters per line (for adults, 45 for children) is easiest to read on-screen.
The average length of an English word is six characters, including the space or punctuation mark that follows it, so that’s a little more than the rule of thumb I suggested. But of course there are always other factors to consider anyway– leading, typeface and font size all come into play too.
Here are some other design guides that mention the “ten words per line” guideline, albeit with less in the way of supporting evidence:
http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/23856.html
http://www.webpagecontent.com/corp_archive/139/5/
http://www.webstyleguide.com/type/lines.html
What about this use of DocBook with a prety output AND navigation sidebars?
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.phpinfo.php