Www.rust-lang.org: Reduce height of highlight blocks to improve readability of section headers

[stevensonmt]

Design Feature Request

Summary

The current highlight blocks have a height that creates a distracting interruption of the text. Reducing this height still provides the effect of boldly setting of the section headers without increasing the difficulty of visually scanning the text.

Motivation

Expected outcome is to improve readability of text.

Drawbacks

Drawbacks are minimal. Would impact the overall extremely bold, blocky design approach to some degree for better or worse.

Maintenance

Maintenance would be minimal as it should be a single property change in the css for the highlight class.

Unresolved Questions

What related issues do you consider out of scope for this feature that could be
addressed in the future independently of the solution that comes out of this
feature?
Scaling back the bold contrast and multiple color scheme would also improve readability and attractiveness, imo, but that is more subjective.

My suggestion below reduces the height from 30px to 24px. I also had to adjust the top positioning property slightly.

[ashleygwilliams]

@stevensonmt i really like this suggestion! i think it's small yet very impactful- would you be willing to make a PR and take some screencaps? thank you for filing!

[jthile]

The readability improvement comes from not slicing through the interior, empty spaces of glyphs, just to put a precise description on the change. The shapes of those spaces are important in recognizing the letters.

[stevensonmt]

When putting together the PR I'd like to not introduce other problems/inconsistencies. The positioning of the bottom of the highlight block is a little inconsistent relative to the bottom edge of descender portion of the 'p' in 'production' versus the 'y' in 'Why Rust'. Is there a preference for which spacing to preserve?

[ashleygwilliams]

@stevensonmt i don't have strong feelings- i defer to what you'd prefer!