Ok hackers, listen up...

I know you love your fluid-width layouts, but just because you can fill the entire window with content, doesn't mean you have to. Blocks of text become difficult to read (and also ugly) when lines get to a certain length. The rule of thumb is that about 60-80 characters per line is comfortable. On my display, this site has about 250 characters per line and it makes me want to hit the back button. Yes, I can use Readability, but that strips out the code formatting. Simple fix: put a containing div around your content, and set a max-width on that container.

See Jashkenas's work for examples of well-formatted technical writing:

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs...

Anyway, looks like a nice resource. Thanks for sharing.

Legibility is vastly improved in the readability-powered version (upper-left button).

Your point still stands, of course.

Good constructive feedback. I thought about it, so one of the next days when I get time, I'll add a little 'Limit Width' button up on top. It'll be freeflow by default, but just one click for those who prefer a narrower format.

Don't leap so quickly to making it a user choice. Just 'Do The Right Thing'. In this case I think enforcing a max width is 'The Right Thing'.

If you disagree then that'a ace but take the responsibility for your own defaults.

The right thing is free-width of course. You have a personal need for narrow lines - no problem.

But a lot more people than you realize do not like narrow lines.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but the parent was offering advice for accessibility to help the member's of the community improve on their projects. Why would you disapprove of that?

I personally hate when sites make the text narrow. If I want the text narrow, I shrink the browser. (Which I never actually do BTW.)

So to me the advice makes things worse, not better. 60-80 chars per line???? Even my email is wider than that. Go for at least 200.

Sure, for some reason standard typographic practice and tons of readability tests that show the need for narrower lines don't apply to you especially.

I mostly attribute it to self-delusion.

Also, none of those 7 even did a proper A/B/A test on what they claim --while the counter-example is well shown in tons of tests.

This, a thousand times this.

Someone needs to make something like Eloquent Javascript [1] for CoffeeScript. The digital version of Eloquent JS has a console at the bottom so you can do the exercises without leaving the page. It sounds minor but when I was first learning javascript this solved a huge pain point.

[1] http://eloquentjavascript.net/chapter1.html

Love the irony. This book is a (heavily altered) version of Marijn's Eloquent JavaScript ... rewritten for CoffeeScript. As an aside, it's a pretty amazing demonstration of what releasing your work under a Creative Commons license can bring about.

It's a great suggestion. @autotelicum -- have you considered adding a little interactive console to the page?

Of course. It started with a pdf/lyx version based on the 400Kb eloquent text file, now the tools (elyxer) made it possible to convert to html with some manual fixes. It would be great to add interactivity next. Not sure when next will be though...

I made this version. It would be great with 'Pull Request's with the kind of improvements that is being suggested here. The source is at https://github.com/autotelicum/Smooth-CoffeeScript/tree/gh-p...

I would also like to know if the 'Send to Kindle' readability function results in a readable document. That was the reason for making this version.

A pdf version, a quick reference and a JavaScript supplement is on the web site at http://autotelicum.github.com/Smooth-CoffeeScript/

I'm waiting to receive it on my Kindle through the Send to Kindle button - I'll report back if and when I get it.

Edit: Okay got it - was really easy to setup with the Readability button. Flipping though the book - the pictures at the start are fine, links open up the browser correct, the prose portion is nicely formatted. The code snippets are, sadly, pretty unreadable. Using the default font most of the lines wrap and it becomes a mess (compounded by coffeescript indentations). Things were a bit better on the Kindle Fire - but that's essentially a tablet browser and I would just go directly to the website vs having it sent as a document.

I'll add that on my Kindle Fire, the code snippets were quite readable when turning into landscape mode.

Not sure if the e-ink Kindles switch to landscape mode as easily.

Kindle3 has landscape, Kindle Touch does not.

Thanks. I will look into what more I can do tomorrow with the Readability and Kindle documentation, maybe some tweaks to CSS or something.

I've yet to find a technical book with lots of snippets that I can read on the Kindle - so it may be a losing battle

Agreed. Though I've tried hard to do so. Kindle is just not a code-friendly device. Landscape helps, but is a pain in the ass to read the non-code text in landscape (for the same reasons as given by the poster above who complained about the wide website text) and advancing pages is painful.

I'm a huge fan of CS (I'm spending about 10 hours a day in it right now for my startup) and I like the simplicity of the actual CS documentation.

This is really nice, but a bit too 'deep' or 'tl;dr' for my personal tastes. I was able to learn the basics really quickly and then started writing code and learning more from there as I ran into things I didn't know how to do.

That said, anything to further the learning of CS is great in my book. Nice job.

Maybe im a bit jaded, but self-important manifesto style stuff like this, complete with Confucius quotes generally turn me off.