[web-devel] Re: The state of documentation

Tue Apr 13 15:31:54 EDT 2010

Thanks for the feedback. The original docs can be found here
( http://hackage.haskell.org/package/xhtml-3000.2.0.1 ). The
changes I added at this point are exclusively in the main description
of the Text.XHtml, Text.XHtml.Table, Text.XHtml.Strict,
Text.XHtml.Transitional and Text.XHtml.Frameset modules. For the
Strict, Transitional, and Frameset modules the only changes from the
original is a blurb about checking the main Text.XHtml package for
detailed documentation.

As for tutorial.happstack.com, no, I don't think that's an example of a
"bad tutorial", nor was I complaining that the tutorials available
for Haskell are in general bad. My complaint is more that the
tutorials can only really be responsible for covering so much
material at which point the core documentation (either the
auto-generated stuff on hackage, or some other source that's mostly
non-existent right now) needs to take up the slack.

Text.XHtml is relatively simple, so I was able to provide the kind of
documentation it needs directly in the haddock, but for larger
non-trivial libraries we really need some kind of standardized
location for documentation. Ideally wherever that is should also be
intergrated into hackage somehow, as hackage is where most newbies
are going to go looking for packages, and the documentation of said
packages.

That being said, there's currently discussion going on in the other
mailing lists about modifications to Hackage to add better support
for documentation in general, and user contributed documentation
in particular, so maybe it's just a matter of time.

-R. Kyle Murphy
--
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 14:51, Thomas Hartman <thomashartman1 at googlemail.com
> wrote:

> Hi Kyle,
>
>  On the whole I am always thrilled when someone works to improve the
> haskell docu, particularly in the web space.
>
>  I am the author of tutorial.happstack.com, which I admit might be an
> example of the type of "bad" tutorials you write of, which
> nevertheless fill a necessary gap during documentation coallescence.
>
>  The reason I didn't give you any feedback is there wasn't an
> easy/fast way for me to see what changes you had made, other than
> flipping back and forth from your docu to the original docu, and I'm
> not even sure where the existing docu is -- hackage I suppose.
>
>  If you had used github or (plug) patch-tag, you might have gotten
> more feedback, or even if you had just (re)stated the type of changes
> you had made.
>
>  Anyway thank you for working to improve the state of haskell on web
> docu, and of course, contribute back to the xhtml maintainers.
>
>  Cheers, thomas.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 6:56 AM, Kyle Murphy <orclev at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I haven't received any response on this at all so far, which I'm not sure
> > how to interpret. Does everyone think I should submit the updated
> > documentation to the maintainer of the xhtml package, or is there some
> issue
> > someone would have with seeing these changes in the official
> distribution?
> > I'm also not sure I'm completely done updating the docs, I'd like to see
> > some better documentation on the actual functions themselves as well, and
> > I'll probably do that before submitting it as a patch.
> >
> > -R. Kyle Murphy
> > --
> > Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 03:16, Kyle Murphy <orclev at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I managed to find some time to put together an example update of the
> >> documentation for xhtml package with the sorts of changes I'd like to
> see
> >> applied to as much of hackage as possible. You can find the updated
> haddock
> >> at http://tenletters.org/haddock/index.html
> >>
> >> Depending on the feedback I get on this updated documentation I might
> try
> >> to get in touch with the xhtml maintainer and have my changes merged in
> to
> >> the official repository. Let me know what you guys think.
> >>
> >> -R. Kyle Murphy
> >> --
> >> Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
> >>
> >>
> >> On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 15:02, Kyle Murphy <orclev at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> That blog post was excellent and fairly well captures the spirit of
> what
> >>> I was getting at, although I do disagree somewhat about the
> auto-generated
> >>> docs. I don't have any problem with auto-generated docs in and of
> >>> themselves, assuming that you also insert into that documentation the
> sort
> >>> of details discussed in the "topic guides". A great example of this is
> most
> >>> of the POD used in Perl modules, where at least the first few
> paragraphs of
> >>> documentation are typically devoted to essentially being a "topic
> guide" for
> >>> that module. I think what she was really complaining about in that post
> is
> >>> exactly the situation we have in hackage currently where there is for
> all
> >>> intents and purpose absolutely no documentation provided for the vast
> >>> majority of libraries beyond the automatically generated signatures and
> the
> >>> odd sentence or two.
> >>>
> >>> Something I'd like to see become common in haddock is for instance, a
> >>> good general description, with references to sub-modules in the main
> module
> >>> of a package. Each sub-module would then function as a topic guide for
> the
> >>> features of that module, with the specific API details contained in the
> >>> function descriptions. If I have some time this weekend maybe I'll pull
> down
> >>> the source for Text.XHTML, and try to update its documentation to
> provide an
> >>> example of what I'm getting at.
> >>>
> >>> -R. Kyle Murphy
> >>> --
> >>> Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 14:36, Gour <gour at gour-nitai.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> On Fri, 9 Apr 2010 14:07:28 -0400
> >>>> >>>>>> "Kyle" == Kyle Murphy wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Kyle> The next highest level of documentation, what's severely lacking
> >>>> Kyle> in the Haskell community in general, and the web development
> >>>> Kyle> community in particular, is the in depth documentation for the
> >>>> Kyle> libraries/frameworks. These documents aren't quite tutorials,
> >>>> Kyle> but they go beyond just telling you the minimal information you
> >>>> Kyle> need to use a function. This sort of document would typically
> >>>> Kyle> have a section for each of the major use cases of your
> >>>> Kyle> framework/library, and possibly a few brief code snippets
> >>>> Kyle> showing how you go about doing particular things.  For instance,
> >>>> Kyle> in the Text.XHTML package, this document would most likely list
> >>>> Kyle> the various functions for generating html elements like br, as
> >>>> Kyle> well as have a section talking about the attribute op (!), the
> >>>> Kyle> Html concatination op (+++), and the Html nesting op (<<), and
> >>>> Kyle> provide examples of how to construct a few example pages. It's
> >>>> Kyle> this level of documentation that's really missing, and where
> >>>> Kyle> most people would head to once they finish following along on
> >>>> Kyle> some tutorial.
> >>>>
> >>>> If we consider that Django is nicely documented and can be used as
> >>>> example, do you think about stuff called 'topic guides' listed at
> >>>>
> >>>> http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/whatsnext/#intro-whatsnext
> >>>>
> >>>> i.e. something in between tutorial and API reference?
> >>>>
> >>>> Here is blog post about it:
> >>>>
> >>>> http://jacobian.org/writing/great-documentation/what-to-write/
> >>>>
> >>>> Kyle> As a final thought, haddock itself might even be leveraged to
> >>>> Kyle> provide this higher level documentation, it certainly has the
> >>>> Kyle> capability of doing so, it just generally isn't used in that
> way.
> >>>> Kyle> The brief summary most people put at the top of the generated
> >>>> Kyle> haddock, which usually consists of a one or two sentence
> >>>> Kyle> description of what the library provides, could instead be used
> >>>> Kyle> to provide details of all the use cases, and links to the
> >>>> Kyle> appropiate pieces of documentation.
> >>>>
> >>>> Long ago I was suggesting on 'cafe' that it would be nice if the
> >>>> haddock documentation would have some 'examples of usage', but it
> >>>> looks it is too much and we are still far from it...
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Sincerely,
> >>>> Gour
> >>>>
> >>>> --
> >>>>
> >>>> Gour  | Hlapicina, Croatia  | GPG key: F96FF5F6
> >>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> >>>>
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> web-devel mailing list
> >>>> web-devel at haskell.org
> >>>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/web-devel
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > web-devel mailing list
> > web-devel at haskell.org
> > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/web-devel
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Need somewhere to put your code? http://patch-tag.com
> Want to build a webapp? http://happstack.com
>
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