[Haskell-cafe] Haddock: patch to generate single-index page in addition to perl-letter indexes indices.

[Ryan Newton]

(Btw, I blame gmail for the mangled title ;-) -- it's been doing some weird
stuff recently on Safari for me; but only in the subject line.  I think
there were backspace characters in an edit that weren't applied.)

The permuted indices are interesting.  It means really committing to the
style/naming conventions, doesn't it?  In common lisp, hyphen separated
names and I guess camel-case for Haskell.  Though you could split on
underscores *or* camel case...

I think multiple ways of indexing the data never hurts (except by confusing
the user a bit).  On that common lisp page I especially like how they've
indented the words.  Frankly I'd like a search box in any interface that
displays more than two thingamajigs.  That should be a UI commandment.

I was expecting the objection of wasted server bandwidth for very large
indices.  I wasn't so worried about the client (even mobile) case.  People
can always press escape if a load takes too long.  And it only happens if
they manually drill down into "All".  Perhaps a good idea would be to follow
the convention used elsewhere <http://svnbook.red-bean.com/> and have a link
with a size warning -- "All Entries (1.6 MB HTML)."  That should keep people
from clicking on it with their smartphone :-).  I can tweak it again to do
that if people like.

Cheers,
  -Ryan



On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Thomas Schilling
<nominolo at googlemail.com>wrote:

> For packages with many items in the index, these pages can get a bit
> huge.  How about a permuted index like
> <http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/X_Symbol.htm>?
>
> E.g., for your use case, you would go to E and then the row with all
> the "End" entries, which would contain all the names with "End"
> anywhere in their name.
>
> I don't know if page size can be a problem, but at least for mobile or
> otherwise low-bandwidth devices this can be a nice alternative.
>
> On 24 October 2010 04:41, Ryan Newton <newton at mit.edu> wrote:
> > When I encounter a split-index (A-Z) page it can be quite frustrating if
> I
> > don't know the first letter of what I'm searching for.  I want to use my
> > browser find!  For example, tonight I wanted to look at all the functions
> > that END in "Window" in the Chart package -- no luck:
> >
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/Chart/0.13.1/doc/html/doc-index.html
> > Therefore I propose that even when generating the "A-Z" individual pages
> > that there also be an "All" option for the single-page version.  Attached
> is
> > a patch against haddock's HEAD (darcs get
> http://code.haskell.org/haddock/
> > right?) that implements this behavior.  As an example, here is FGL's
> > documentation built with the patched haddock:
> >   http://people.csail.mit.edu/newton/fgl_example_doc/doc-index.html
> > The great thing about hackage being centralized is that if people are
> happy
> > with this fix it can be widely deployed where it counts, and quickly!
> > Cheers,
> >    -Ryan
> > P.S. At the other end of the spectrum, when considering a central index
> for
> > all of hackage (as in the below ticket) maybe it would be necessary to
> have
> > more than 26 pages,  I.e. Aa-Am | An-Az or whatever.
> >     http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/516#comment:6
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> > Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Push the envelope. Watch it bend.
>
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