Docs 3.0 Preview! (Develop Section)

[thisisjoshford]

👋 Welcome!

We’re using Discussions as a place to connect with other members of our community and gain insight into our new Docs layout (currently a WIP) see here: https://near-docs.io/develop/welcome.

For this thread we would like you to review the develop section and give us your thoughts and opinions about this new layout! The rest of the site is not yet ready but feel free to poke around and give leave us with some of your thoughts.

[ForTheGranny]

Hey,

Looks bad, too much noise (overuse of colors) and excessive usage of symbols on the left side (resembles web pages of the 2000s). It does not feel clean and it is not easy to navigate.

The current page layout (at https://docs.near.org/docs/develop/basics/getting-started) is much better and cleaner. It does not take your attention to colors and symbols on the left side.

[gagdiez]

Hey @ForTheGranny, thanks for the feedback, we have tuned down the amount of emojies. Let us know what you think about the content as well :).

[vans163]

As a developer I like the emojis because they are quicker to associate than words, esp if english is not your first language. So dont like this change :P

Actually interesting backstory on the importance of representation of characters, there was a situation in a competitive large scale PVP game when english speaking players complained of banner character limits because for example languages like Korean could represent much more information in much less visible characters and it would give those teams an unfair advantage in coordinating large groups (we are talking 1000 vs 1000 pvp). For example at a 6 char UTF8 limit, 6 english letters could write 1 word but 6 Korean jamo (letters/symbols) could right an entire sentence making coordination much easier on what positions to take/rotate into.

[gagdiez]

hey @vans163, thanks for the feedback. I do think you have a valid point, we will see how to properly merge both visions. Thanks!

[vans163]

Im loving this multi lang multi file code browser

Icons should be the native icons to the lang (Rust icon instead of crab)
Perhaps make the tab text a little smaller and draw a small line seperate to tell that they are tabs for the lang.

Add a way to execute javascript code inbrowser for POST/GET calls to the NEAR PUBLIC API (querying a balance or transaction without having access token)

I note the icons are all part of the emoji UTF8 charset, but will chime in on the choices anyways.

The text and icon combination is really clean here, i think its the way forward, resembles a clean notion alot.

Slightly better icon choices for these would do, to resemble true pipeline icons that we are familiar with. (Deploy & Use a Play button perhaps)

Develop icon a notebook (tho chat/discorse makes alot of sense for develop too, come to think of it we chat more than code)
Wand for test is perfect.

Loving it so far, much better than before IMO. also text sizing is perfect for my browser on linux. I want to fork it for our docs at https://gpux.ai, hope you dont mind :)

[flmel]

That's a great direction docs have been a bit of a pain since they were scattered all around. One minor improvement that comes to mind is that since we change state with selecting either Rust or As for the examples, maybe that could be stored so next time when we open the docs or we click around them we don't have to click Rust/AS every single time. I agree with @ForTheGranny and @vans163 that it could be improved designwise

[sonnyvesali]

I think doubling down on specific high-frequency use-case scenarios in the documentation would work well. For example, this could include testing token transfers in unit tests vs testing payable functions. Perhaps the best way to do this is to survey a bunch of the common patterns in a bunch of NEAR smart contract code and aggregate those as a critical convenience for new developers. I also think a part of the documentation that covers specific rust smart contract security anti-patterns would be a great addition as well. I would be more than happy to help contribute to help make this documentation the most helpful it can be :) .

[gagdiez]

hey @sonnyvesali. Thanks for the feedback! Indeed, we started a new initiative with the "education team" to create more examples. We will keep y'all updated as we release them.

[rossedwardsus]

Agreed with this comment. I am playing around with Near as i am learning rust and i am finding the documentation is often focused on only one small piece of a larger user experience. So it makes it difficult to understand how to implement the rest using Near best practices.

[vans163]

Agree.
Github Advanced Search has been a godsend for this @rossedwardsus, a lot a lot of good code floating around as hackathon submissions. I dug up a full AssemblyScript NFT Standard implementation using it once lol (NEAR only officially supports the Rust NFT Standard Implementation).

[vans163]

We forked this over here (https://github.com/gpuedge/docs) and deployed to cloudflare pages. There was an issue with the docs folder and website both being at the root and the website folder referencing ../docs so we moved the docs folder under website. But the more correct solution would probably be to move website/* contents to ..

Cloudflare pages deployed here https://docs.gpux.ai/.