Tips and Tricks out of control?

[Garbee]

I came across the Tips and Tricks page of the docs this morning. It looks like a monolithic grab-bag of features that are well documented (sometimes even pretty exact) in other areas mixed in with things that really should be called out for either not fitting into other areas or being really niche uses that may come in handy.

For example the settings section rehashes a few emulation demos that currently reside in the Device Mode docs.

Is this a page that should be gone over and cross-referenced with the rest of the docs to try and minimize duplication? Or should we simply rethink how this page is structured and refactor accordingly?

imo we should either (with 2 being my primary choice for simply keeping the docs concise.):

1. Remove the major content sections covered in other areas and replace them with quick references explaining what is possible.
2. Refactor the whole thing so that the content that is unique is what stays and the rest is tossed out.

[addyosmani]

I would favour 2 here if possible.

[Garbee]

So Irish and I just discussed this in IRC. What we have decided is for me to audit the page and see what amount of the content is actually unique/worth saving. If it is a small enough amount, we are simply going to move that content into more appropriate areas of the docs and kill this page itself. If a good chunk of content really does belong here and nowhere else, then I'll scrape the docs clean and save that content.

Most of this pages traffic seems to come from search by far (like 71%) and it is the 13th most popular page. So, if it is mostly duplicate content, then the proper pages for that content should naturally get the traffic, along with happier devs since they are getting more related information in their visit.

[Garbee]

• [ ] Shadow DOM inspection
• [ ] Quite a bit of content from timeline through profiles
• [ ] Some sourcemaps data (and sass later on to go with it)
  • Duplicated in the debugging javascript docs.
• [ ] Websocket inspection

These seem to be the highest quality of content. I don't know if it is covered elsewhere yet (even though I know sourcemaps stuff is not, issue #139 exists to track that) so I'll followup after auditing the other relevant areas of the docs and pull any useful information into them.

Overall, the page doesn't have high enough quality content to be saved. The quality stuff seems to have much better homes in other areas with other more relevant information.

[Garbee]

Maybe a way to solve the nagging issue of pointing out tricks for different features is to have a "tricks" section of the pages when it comes up. For example the breakpoints doc page could benefit from this setup for a "logpoint" trick to log data but not break execution of the script. This would let us have those little helpers that are difficult to fit into a "protip" note callout in their own collected area while still being in the same space as the rest of the associated content.

[Garbee]

People are still finding this page and learning from it. So maybe some way should be found to keep it around with more some detail of things (perhaps more long-form examples) then linking off to more specific doc areas to learn more.

[Garbee]

In today's IRC meeting we decided to go ahead and clean this page out as much as possible. However instead of removing it will are going to try to keep it updated with the newest tricks to enter the DevTool arsenal (or maybe some age-old ones but still highly obscure). Such as the new eyedropper for styles. This way new features get an extra highlight, while still encouraging people to get deeper into the toolset and documentation to learn more.

I think we should come to some kind of hard limit on the number of things to be featured though. That way we don't end up with another page that is upkeep hell.