Remove old docs.

[Mugen87]

Related issue: -

Description

The PR removes the old documentation.

The new docs are based on JSDoc and generated in the docs/ directory now. This directory is not under version control anymore.

Some notes about the docs:

• They are build with the npm script: npm run build-docs
• Because of the amount of JSDoc in three's codebase, the script takes around 1 min to generate the documentation.
• The generated pages land in a docs/<project_name>/<version> folder. So if you build now, it's docs/three/0.174.0.
• As mentioned in Offloading the Hosting and Maintenance of the Non-English Docs #24984, the new docs support no i18n anymore. The pages are only available in English.

[krakowdeveloper]

@Mugen87 do you know then which is the actual status for translate and add new language like Spanish in case i want to push the contribution I'm doing?

[Mugen87]

This aspect is discussed in #24984. It seems @DefinitelyMaybe is working on a new approach.

[mrdoob]

The PR removes the old documentation.

Won't this break thousands of links online? It will also break all the links that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok provide.

How about keeping the current documentation but adding some js code that redirects to the new page?

The new docs are based on JSDoc and generated in the docs/ directory now. This directory is not under version control anymore.

Why don't we have it on version control? I can just run npm run build-docs as part of the release process.

• The generated pages land in a docs/<project_name>/<version> folder. So if you build now, it's docs/three/0.174.0.

Does this mean that gh-pages will have multiple versions of the documentation from now on?
Wouldn't that make us run out of space on gh-pages at some point?

[Mugen87]

Won't this break thousands of links online? It will also break all the links that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok provide.

Yes, that would happen since the new documentation has completely different links. However, search engines and AI tools normally detect 404s and remove the links from their result. They should be replaced over time when the new pages got indexed.

How about keeping the current documentation but adding some js code that redirects to the new page?

The problem with client-side redirects via JavaScript is that not every tool detects it, afaik. It would be different if we could configure a redirect with gh-pages on the server side (like with apache) since that results in a HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently).

I'm afraid the old pages would get indexed and evaluated by AI tools although they are not maintained anymore. In the worst case, they share outdated information or suggest legacy code snippets.

Why don't we have it on version control? I can just run npm run build-docs as part of the release process.

The source of the documentation that you want under version control is the JSDoc in src and addons as well as the template. Normally, build artifacts are not part of the version control since what matters are changes in the source.

Does this mean that gh-pages will have multiple versions of the documentation from now on?

You would just publish the generated documentation from the current release to gh-pages. So there won't be multiple versions of the documentation online.

[Mugen87]

If you are not feeling well with the removal, then let's revert the PR so we have time to think about redirects for the old pages.

[mrdoob]

Yeah, lets not remove the current docs until we know how to help move people to the new docs.
I've just checked analytics and the current docs get 500k views per moth.