[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: simple interface to libraries Haddock

[David House]

Hey all,

I'm proposing something simple that should make it easier for both
Haskell programmers and Haskell tool writers to find the documentation
for a function. We need a simple URL for the Haddock docs of any
function. PHP has this already: just hit php.net/funcname for the
documentation for funcname(). My proposal is similarly simple:

http://docs.haskell.org/funcname

A CGI script would find funcname in the index and redirect to the URL
of the docs for funcname. The only contentious issue is what to do in
case of ambiguous lookups; i.e. would docs.haskell.org/lookup be
Data.Map.lookup, or Data.List.lookup? My suggestion is that we present
a page saying 'which function did you mean?'. We should also allow a
way to be unambiguous in the URL:

http://docs.haskell.org/Data.Map.funcname

Pros:

1) It's really easy to find the documentation for any function.
2) It's really easy to write a tool that finds documentation for a
function (including Firefox keywords, Emacs/Vim integration, GHCi
integration and so on).

Any comments?

-- 
-David House, dmhouse at gmail.com