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I appreciate the work the Go team put into pkg.go.dev, and I like the new features they've put in (e.g. flagging deprecated things, the search is great) and hop
by s-video 5y ago
I appreciate the work the Go team put into pkg.go.dev, and I like the new features they've put in (e.g. flagging deprecated things, the search is great) and hope those get into godocs.io as well. But I really just don't care for how its designed compared to the old godoc.org. (and go.dev compared to the old golang.org) It just doesn't gel with me. I wish I had the design vocabulary to explain why. It just feels big, and loud, and cramped. And I really don't care for the animations and drop shadows. The old docs site and old home page just felt quieter, less commercial, yet still fresh and modern and professional. My ideal Go docs site would have the appearance of the old golang.org/pkg pages, with a fixed width.
I don't even agree with a lot of the criticism thrown at pkg.go.dev. In older threads Russ Cox gave perfectly acceptable reasons to not accept every license. (legal stuff, better safe than sorry) There's the fact that the source wasn't available for like a month at first, but that changed once it was brought up, and I don't think the Go team was trying hide anything or something. It's mostly just the design that gets me.
That, and, I'm little puzzled as to how they rolled out pkg.go.dev, and go.dev, and replaced golang.org with go.dev. Like, at first they rolled out pkg.go.dev, saying "godoc.org is really old, so we're replacing it". Sure. But pkg.go.dev obviously came with go.dev, which they just called a "discovery site" (or something to that effect, I don't remember). ...okay? Then they stripped off golang.org/pkg (the old standard library documentation) and the reason they gave was to reduce the number of doc servers they had to run. And finally, they just scrapped golang.org and replaced it with go.dev.
What's really odd to me is that, in retrospect, it seems like they had a long term plan to replace golang.org altogether, at least since they rolled out pkg.go.dev, but just... didn't mention it? It seems highly unlikely that they just rolled out a new package doc site, along with a free bonus "discovery site" -- they never billed it as a new home page until it became the actual home page -- and then noticed the discovery site could conveniently be the new home page.
Furthermore, on Twitter, someone criticized the way go.dev has corporate logos, and one of the Go project managers (or some such role, I don't know) replied that it was for funding the project. (I'll dig up that thread if someone REALLY wants me to) So, I'm really convinced that it was always the plan to replace golang.org, but its just bizarre to me that it wasn't communicated like that since the start. It sort of came off as a series of happy accidents. Why not just announce the plan to replace golang.org at the start? Why wait to announce your intentions until you actually do it? I'm not trying to be accusatory and suspicious, I don't think anyone should be, but it's something that I just can't get off of my mind.
...ok, all that said, I'm really grateful for the work and progress done with godocs.io. Keep it up! :)