1. In some cases, the Construction and the function's overview were intermixed, and it was difficult to refer to argument place holders in the description before the construction was shown. I opted for showing the function's syntax up front, which allows the argument placeholders to be used in the descriptive text. In some cases, the construction was a single line.
2. Can you explain what you mean by "The old theme made each expression distinct from the background"? Each section does have a border - the inner border is very subtle. If folks feel strongly, I'll make it more prominent.
3. I can add a larger chunk of whitespace after each example's text if that will help. The whitespace between paragraphs is larger than that within a paragraph. This is how the wiki breaks paragraphs at newlines. The previous page added an extra break, so it was like 1.5x.
If I'm writing up a complex expression, I may need to refer to three or four items. If I'm quickly scanning over the page, the old theme using clearly defined borders and three sections for each expression makes that very quick; I know immediately that I want the middle section, or the last one, and it's clearly defined.
With the new look, the first two sections have now been combined, and the subtle border means that it just reads as a single block of text. I know that there are headings on the left, but it just doesn't read as easily for me. Extra whitespace would definitely help though.
4. I can use monospace. I used Consolas back when I did the regex() documentation, because the default monospace made examples very difficult to read. As far as italics for argument values, I'm not inclined to remove the italics here. Italics are reserved here for placeholder text, and this is common in technical documentation.
I think the problem that I have with Consolas
in general, is that it's designed to read like a regular sans-serif font, rather than clearly being a "monospaced" font, if that makes any sense.
For some people this may be a good thing, but I find it's a lot easier to scan a block of text and look for the code examples when it doesn't blend in as easily.
I think defining monospace will just use whichever font you have selected in your browser.
I do think the page
looks good though - it's probably just a case of me being used to the old one, more than anything else.