[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: Haddock version 2.4.0

[Simon Marlow]

David Waern wrote:
> 2008/11/6 Wolfgang Jeltsch <g9ks157k at acme.softbase.org>:
>> Am Donnerstag, 6. November 2008 00:21 schrieb David Waern:
>>>   * Add framed view of the HTML documentation
>> After many years with many people telling us that frames are bad, you add
>> frame support to Haddock?  Hmm.
> 
> You should discuss this with Simon Marlow, as it was his idea. Thomas
> Schilling implemented it. Personally, I think the frames are quite
> handy, although not that pretty in their current form. More
> importantly, you don't need to use them if you don't want to. Haddock
> still generates the normal index.html as well as frames.html.

It wasn't really my idea, it came from something Simon Michael did for 
darcs, although it doesn't seem to be working now:

http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2008-September/014084.html

I mentioned it to Thomas, who implemented something similar for Haddock.  I 
think the conclusion we came to was that frames are probably not the right 
way to go (surprise), but we'd still like a better layout for Haddock 
pages.  It's looking a bit dated now, and you have to scroll through pages 
of useless synopsis to get to the real docs.  Also the layout is internally 
horrible, using lots of fixed-size table cells - I played around with lots 
of different approaches to the layout at the time, but it had to work in 
IE6 which meant that most things didn't work.  I'd really love it if 
someone could give Haddock a facelift.

Cheers,
	Simon