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by habosa 2843 days ago
First of all this looks pretty nice. I'm a docs nerd and as a whole I like this.

However ... It's slow. Docs should be static HTML. I should not ever wait for text content. If you want to async load some images or embeds that's fine, but I was waiting for the title to load!

As an aside I recently had a nice experience making a static docs site using Nuxt and Vue. Nice combination of dynamic development and fast performance in production.

2 comments

I agree, this should have been HTML, not chasing the latest JavaScript fad. They managed to get links wrong. How on earth can you get something so easy and fundamental wrong!? I hold down command and click all the time to open in a new tab. They've got it opening in a new tab and following the link, so you can't stay in one place and open several tabs. This is something a beginner with an hour's experience of HTML can get right.
> This is something a beginner with an hour's experience of HTML can get right.

Not to mention it won't take them 2.5 MB, 56 requests, and over three seconds to do it.

Hey @JimDabell, We just launched the internal links feature yesterday in beta mode to test how the users use it! It is still not announced to the users. Your feedback is amazing and we will be looking to enhance it ;) Cheers, Z
And it's fixed now!
Thanks, I can verify that's fixed. The larger point still stands though – testing this, it took 29.74s to load. DOMContentLoaded 19.79s / Load 21.13s. Your main.….js alone took 16.31s. A static HTML page would have taken a fraction of the time and it would be easier to get the basics right. Using an SPA for documentation seems completely wrong.
Hey again, A CDN and compression is now activated. We achieved 2.3x faster application and only 300ms difference between first meaningful paint in London and in Hong Kong. Can you please give it another try now ;)
Hey @JimDabell, can you tell me where are you based?
From their profile: Based in Brighton & Hove, U.K.
I agree with this in principle, except that a good docs library should also have nice full text searching capability. I've yet to see a FT search capability that works nicely with a static doc site.
Exactly! Static documentation has a limit of where it can go. It simply does not scale for big projects.