Blender 2.8's readme.html

(I’ve never noticed the readme file before, so I assume it’s new in Blender 2.8. I could just be ignorant, though)

The readme.html file in Blender 2.8 is a bit weird. If you look at the source of the HTML file, you’ll find CSS rules that do nothing (one of them calls for Times, another calls for Lucida Grande, but those fonts are never used in the document), headings created by using the <b> tag instead of the proper heading tag (the <b> tag was deprecated in HTML 5), and bullet points constructed using the UTF-8 character instead of just using <ul>. All of this creates an HTML 4.01 document that looks like this:


A few CSS rules later, I came up with this.


I’ve modeled it after the way .md files look on github.com, using only system fonts. I’ve made the line length narrower and used semantic HTML tags. In the end, the HTML 5 document actually had a smaller file size than the original HTML 4.01 document, at only 5.57 kilobytes versus 6.16 kilobytes. Okay, the size difference isn’t that drastic, but I’m trying to prove that HTML can be both pretty and lightweight.

I’m not saying my readme file is better; I just wanted to take this rare opportunity, as an artist pleb with no programming experience, to improve Blender in a really negligible way. So negligible, in fact, that I’m not even touching any of Blender’s code. No one reads readme files, anyway.

Thanks for letting me pretend to be helping!

Bibliography
https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
https://practicaltypography.com/bulleted-and-numbered-lists.html

There’s always been one for each version since at least 2.3x from well over a decade ago.

They also came with a 1 page pdf quick start guide. Maybe you could update that for the current version of blender.

Attachments

BlenderQuickStart.pdf.zip (102 KB)