In case we keep the 3-bar layout (topbar, left + right sidebar with central body content), I think the main question becomes how to align this content on the screen (what @choldgraf mentions about centering vs left-justifying).

Just putting some other examples here of different options:

Readthedocs (https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html)

-> they left-justify everything (but don't have a separate left TOC sidebar), resulting in a lot of white space at one side of the screen (or grey space here ;)). I think this is what @choldgraf mentioned above about noticing whitespace more if it is all on one side.

Some projects using readthedocs therefore also customize it to put the content in the middle, see eg https://xtensor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Similar to how xtensor centers the content with readtheocs, another example of this:

Elixir docs (https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/library-guidelines.html#getting-started)

-> they center the main text, but keep the left sidebar left-aligned

Docker (https://docs.docker.com/engine/docker-overview/)

-> they left-justify the text body, but keep the TOC sidebar right-justified (and so no longer directly next to the text). Although it is left-justified, the amount of "whitespace in the middle of the screen" is still somewhat limited (at least on my screen) because the width of the main text is still relatively big.

Git book, eg Metaflow docs (https://docs.metaflow.org/introduction/what-is-metaflow) or tiledb (https://docs.tiledb.com/main/use-cases/dataframes)

-> they center the main text content together with left and right sidebar next to it, leaving the whitespace fully on the right and on the left

Plotly (https://plot.ly/python/plotly-express/#maps)

-> similar as the one above in that they center the content + sidebar together (but they only have one sidebar)

Tensorflow (https://www.tensorflow.org/guide/keras/overview)

-> the left sidebar is left-justified, and then I think the main text body is centered with the right TOC sidebar put next to the text (but not taken into account for centering). But would need to look at the exact number of pixels or the css to be sure :)

Other example of the same concept (another google site, https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/pythontutorial):

Let's also show the other deep learning framework to stay neutral :)

https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/autograd.html

-> I thought this started as a readthedocs fork (but nowadays it is less visible, or it changed). So everything is also left-justified, but because everything is quite wide, the whitespace on the right annoys me not as much here.

Sparklyr / RStudio (https://spark.rstudio.com/dplyr/)

-> they left-justify the left-sidebar + content, but keep the TOC sidebar right-justified
(BTW, I like here how the TOC sidebar is really subtle: it's there if you want to use it / look at it, but it also doesn't really annoy otherwise)
This is similar to the docker example, but the whitespace is more apparent because the width of the content is smaller.

So far the doc sites I gathered over the year thinking about a better theme .. Sorry for the long post :)

Description

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

Issue actions