It seems most people like the new documentation style. I do not. I actually use the documentation on a daily basis, so I am less impressed with look-and-feel and most sensitive to any degradation in actual usability.
Today I discovered that the navigation menu no longer includes applications! How is this an improvement?
At the top of the top page you can select the version from a drop down and quickly see what has changed between versions. Prior to 27 the navigation menu was organized in an Application Groups section, then that header was removed but the grouping remained. Now we have to navigate to Module Index, locate a module of the application and select the link in the third column (which is unnecessarily truncated).
This is plain obfuscation. Why would we be hiding the concept of applications? My suggestion would be an Applications section, if you want to simplify the top level navigation menu.
One of my complaints about the new style, beginning in 27, is how the modules within an application are organized. This used to be a flat list, ordered alphabetically, but is now grouped by concept(?). This impedes me because to find a module I now have to guess what group it may be in. For example to find lists in stdlib I need to know it’s a datatype and not a data structure.
Similarly in erts the functions of the erlang module are grouped by other concepts, causing me to stop and think about where to find it.
Now I realize that the root problem here is that while I actually read the documentation, few people do anymore. I do not however accept that that truism reflects on the importance of the documentation.
