Poor wording on "first edition" stubs

[fintelia]

Once #1788 lands this will be much less of an issue because pages will stop showing up in search results, but when viewing pages from the first edition of the book (for instance this chapter on macros) the stub indicating that it has been deprecated could be vastly improved:

Macros

Having a title that is the topic I wanted to read about, but different page content is kind of annoying. It also probably hurts SEO for the second edition

The first edition of the book is no longer distributed with Rust's documentation.

While technically true, this first sentence is deceptive since a reader may assume that the first edition of the book is unavailable ("I'm looking at some Rust documentation, and you say the book isn't distributed with it"). In reality, it is only left out of offline versions and the web version is only one click away.

If you came here via a link or web search, you may want to check out the current version of the book instead.

The link points to the intro of the second edition which is almost surely not want the visitor wanted. Linking to the actually content would be ideal. The reason I used a search engine was because it is faster than navigating to the right section of an ebook. It is also not ideal to assume that

If you have an internet connection, you can find a copy distributed with Rust 1.30.

"If you have an internet connection" is a very confusing thing to put on a website. Of course I have an internet connection, how else would I be reading this? The first several times I misread it as saying "if you don't have an internet connection" then you can use the version distributed with Rust which would be at least a slightly more sensible thing to say. It took me a really long time to figure out that the first edition hadn't been taken down entirely.

[steveklabnik]

(on the internet connection thing, if you’re reading the copy of the local docs distributed with rust, you may or may not have Internet.)

…

On Feb 2, 2019, at 1:15 AM, Jonathan Behrens ***@***.***> wrote: Once #1788 lands this will be much less of an issue because pages will stop showing up in search results, but when viewing pages from the first edition of the book (for instance this chapter on macros) the stub indicating that it has been deprecated could be vastly improved: Macros Having a title that is the topic I wanted to read about, but different page content is kind of annoying. It also probably hurts SEO for the second edition The first edition of the book is no longer distributed with Rust's documentation. While technically true, this first sentence is deceptive since a reader may assume that the first edition of the book is unavailable ("I'm looking at some Rust documentation, and you say the book isn't distributed with it"). In reality, it is only left out of offline versions and the web version is only one click away. If you came here via a link or web search, you may want to check out the current version of the book instead. The link points to the intro of the second edition which is almost surely not want the visitor wanted. Linking to the actually content would be ideal. The reason I used a search engine was because it is faster than navigating to the right section of an ebook. It is also not ideal to assume that If you have an internet connection, you can find a copy distributed with Rust 1.30. "If you have an internet connection" is a very confusing thing to put on a website. Of course I have an internet connection, how else would I be reading this? The first several times I misread it as saying "if you don't have an internet connection" then you can use the version distributed with Rust which would be at least a slightly more sensible thing to say (even ). It took me a really long time to figure out that the first edition hadn't been taken down entirely. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[kornelski]

I get that offline and online docs are generated from the same source, but the end result is confusing. It is confusing to users, and it is confusing to Google, which returns the "offline" stubs for majority of Rust-related searches.

The docs site desperately needs to expand robots.txt.