Better indexable docs

[Klaasvaak]

Description

I'm noticing the docs hosted on https://threejs.org/docs/ use hash based routing and it doesn't include a sitemap. This makes it harder for crawlers to index the docs.

I ran into this while adding docs of threejs to the Cursor IDE. See feature here

I also noticed you have a gh-pages branch. Are these pages hosted somewhere else, or is this the source for https://threejs.org/docs/ ?

Solution

Host the docs as static html pages without hash based routing. Nice to have would be a sitemap.

Alternatives

I know the chance is high the answer here is going to be: "they should fix it" instead. But I do think serving static html pages for docs without hash based routing is a general improvement as well.

Additional context

No response

[Mugen87]

We are currently in the process to move to JSDoc. We use a custom template which is based on the default JSDoc theme.

Would this still be an issue if we replace the existing docs with our new approach? JSDoc pages do not rely on iFrame and use hashes only for ordinary anchors (but not for the site itself).

If you want to check things out, you can build the new documentation locally via npm run build-docs and then go to http://localhost:8080/docs_new.

[Klaasvaak]

@Mugen87 That looks cool :) I was able to build this locally.

I'm guessing that when all the pages are html files, and they are explorable with proper <a /> elements without using the hash routing this should work better. Having the hash to link to a section of the page makes sense.

Let me know if you need any help for this