in reply to Re^2: An alternative Perldoc site
in thread An alternative Perldoc site

The http://perldoc.perldrunks.org site is still quite heavily under development, so if could please be a bit more specific about what it is you don't like about the site then I'll certainly take your comments on board.

Either post here or feel free to email me directly at jj@jonallen.info.

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Re^4: An alternative Perldoc site
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jan 23, 2005 at 14:33 UTC

    It's not interlinked.

    F.ex, look at the perl POD page on perldoc.com: each POD page name it mentions is hyperlinked. Your version of perl has no links. Same goes for the “See also“ section of the POD pages on your site. Check the rendition of perlfunc on perldoc.com: the functions are all linked. Then click its link for unpack and compare with your version of the unpack documentation: on perldoc.com, the link actually leads to pack, on your site, it does nothing. That forces the user to constantly back out of his reading and delve into the navigation to locate where it is what they wanted to read, before being able to continue.

    I realize providing such extensive linking requires non-trivial guessing in the general case and even special case guessing for some particular POD pages. I did write a POD-tree-to-HTML-tree converter myself, so I know it can be a pretty ugly job.

    But not doing that greatly diminishes the value of the resulting docs, at least as far as I'm concerned.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

      Thanks Aristotle, those suggestions have now been implemented.

        Sweet! I spent 10 minutes aimlessly surfing around; it's fun to use now. And now that I'm not annoyed at having to use the main navigation to find everything, I found myself appreciating how well it is set up. Good job!

        Is it automatically generated, and if so do you plan to release the code at any stage? It would be cool if people could generate local copies from the docs that are actually on their system, particular if non-core modules could be included in such copies.

        Makeshifts last the longest.

      Hi Aristotle,

      Thanks for the feedback, I'll put it on the to-do list for future versions.

      JJ