New submission from Terry J. Reedy:

For the Windows Help version of the docs, the left side box has 4 tabs: 
Contents, Index, Search, Favorites. I now mostly use the Index tab. That means 
that I can enter an indexed keyword, topic, or object name and jump from place 
to place in the docs.

The left margin of the online docs only has a text search box equivalent to the 
Windows search tab (which I essentially never use). The index is only available 
on the front page, possibly not even visible without scrolling. Consequently, 
people, especially beginners, tend to use the text search box when they should 
be using the index. The result is often useless.

The issue came up on python-list about a beginner entering 'print' and getting 
nothing useful. With the Windows doc, 'print' in the index search immediately 
brings up print (builtin function) (twice, I did not look into why). The same 
thing in the search lists 153 pages, with the builtin functions page at 75. Not 
too surprising, as it is a long page with only 3 occurrences of 'print'. Also 
not useful.

So I think the online docs should also have an always available index search 
box in addition to the text search box (which should be properly labeled as 
such). 'Enter a module, class, for function name.' should be applied to index 
search, not text search.

An alternative is for the one box to give both index search results and text 
search results, but doing the latter when one only wants the former is a waste 
of both server and reader resources.

----------
assignee: docs@python
components: Documentation
messages: 169930
nosy: docs@python, eric.araujo, ezio.melotti, georg.brandl, terry.reedy
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Online docs: make index search always available.
type: enhancement
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.2, Python 3.3, Python 3.4

_______________________________________
Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue15871>
_______________________________________
_______________________________________________
Python-bugs-list mailing list
Unsubscribe: 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com

Reply via email to