[herodotus]

> Way Cooler is a Wayland compositor that was written in Rust using wlc

I know it is not easy, but I wish the author could have started with a paragraph that could help someone like me know whether or not the rest of the article would be something I would like to read.

How about something like this (and of course I may some of the facts wrong, but I want to be as constructive as I can):

"Wayland is a Windows manager developed as a better alternative to X-Windows. Way Cooler is a tiling Wayland manager, written in Rust, and designed to be easily extendible. In this article I describe my experience in trying to refactor it, for reasons that will be described below. I will also explain why, in certain instances, C was a better choice for this project than Rust."

[guelo]

You weren't the audience of this article. Since he wrote it as a blog post on way-cooler.com he surely was expecting his audience to be people familiar with Way Cooler, Wayland and Rust. He doesn't have a responsibility to dumb it down for you. And anyway it only takes a few minutes for you to get the context. Which you did, good job.

[dmix]

So it's way-cooler.com's fault for not explaining what their library/website is about.

Which unfortunately is par for the course on 99% of company blogs, which never explain what the company does without going onto the homepage (which even then is often confusing).

[OhSoHumble]

It's not a company blog. It's a some guy's open source side project. Ya' know... free... open source... side project... that's he's voluntarily sharing technical information on.

Really, it's not the guy's responsibility to over-inflate the article because some people need their hand held. It's a blog about about Rust, Wayland, and window managers. If you don't know what those things are then, like, Wikipedia is there for you, man.

It's like going to a programming languages website and going "well, gee, these guys suck for not explaining what a programming language is on their homepage what is with everyone being so discourteous!?"

And it's not like a paragraph of context would have mattered anyways; if you don't know what Rust is, what Wayland is, or what tiling window managers are then you'll need a lot more background knowledge before the article's content begins to be assailable.

[ghettoimp]

Definitely. So often, whole articles and even much of the ensuing discussion will be using project names and acronyms that I don't know about. A sentence or two of context, or even just links going off to the project/acronym the first time it is used, are wonderfully useful for the wider audience.

[stagger87]

There are links in the first sentence!

[tellak]

So tempting to put a link to jwz.org here.

But seriously, this sounds more like the responsibility of the link submitter and/or this website then every person on the internet that wants to write a blog post for a limited audience.

[nemetroid]

I believe there are two parts to this argument:

1. articles should start with a brief summary of their context, arguments and conclusions.

2. articles should explain their terminology.

The first point I agree with (and believe most do). But the second point is arbitrary, and in my personal opinion, the linked article is fine in this regard (anyone familiar with X-Windows should be familiar with Wayland as a concept, and every single article related to Wayland cannot be expected to explain core abstractions like compositors).