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Why would one not include screenshots in the Readme for a GUI library?

• chrismorgan 4y ago
  Because that’s not traditionally what readme files were for, and this one is much more of the traditional style of readme file, not the more recent style where a GitHub repository is treated as a landing page and the canonical source of information about a project, and the readme file presented up front. Traditionally, readme files were for what you might want to do once you had received the code, which most obviously means how to build it. They were certainly not intended as landing pages, as GitHub has co-opted them (and some, perhaps most, other forges have since followed suit). We’ve reached the stage, in fact, where a readme file in a repository is regularly actually something that should be ignored as irrelevant when you obtain a copy of a repository. And quite possibly that it’ll be chock-full of obscure HTML markup that tries to achieve certain appearances by depending on GitHub’s stylesheets and abusing elements. So much for “read me” and the intentions of languages like Markdown. A better link for this HN submission would be http://prima.eu.org/ http://prima.eu.org/, which is the actual project page. The GitHub repository currently linked is only the source code. It’s reasonable for it to have a link back to the site for more information, as it does (though it’d be better more prominently placed at the very start), and there’s no call for it to include the screenshots in any form.
  • solarkraft 4y ago
    I prefer Github repos over websites because they tend to much more reliability actually contain information about the project.