I've just passed a milestone in the development of a suite of modules
for rendering a collection of POD6 content files.
Please take a look at http://raku.finanalyst.org and especially
http://raku.finanalyst.org/search.html
Please let me know whether you find the search interface easier than the
one on the official site.
(I will be updating based on feedback. Eg., I will be showing links and
visited links more clearly, but not with blue/purple of standard HTML)
Both search functions (the official one, and mine) rely on the same
underlying information, but it is presented in a different way. I wanted
(a) more context when searching, (b) I want previous searches to be
retained in case the place I went to does not have the information was
looking for.
Please also bear in mind that this is a system still being developed. So
there are some wrinkles:
1: There are numerous places in the official Raku docs where links
target 'virtual' files. These virtual files do not exist in the
Raku/docs directory, but are generated by the software developed to
render the POD6 files, namely Documentable. Personally, I think having
links to virtual files is fragile, and it does make the development of
an alternative system of viewing the docs more difficult.
2: The inheritance diagrams in the standard documentation system are not
cited in the official Raku docs, but are "sewn in" by Documentable based
on a single text file that describes relationships.
The reasons I developed this new system?
- I want to create a Blog site, a site for translations from English to
Welsh, and a site for my business that rely mostly on Raku, not php.
- The underlying content of most CMS suites seems to be MarkDown. But
MarkDown does not allow for any meta data to be attached to text. POD6
is both simple to write, but it also allows for meta data to be attached
to paragraphs, headers, blocks. You can see some of this potential by
clicking on the Collection button at raku.finanalyst.org
- I'm not entirely happy with the Documentable/Pod::To::HTML modules
that are used to render Raku Documentation, and I hate it when people
criticise things without providing some systematic alternative. So
here's an alternative.
I have more to say about Module documentation, but that involves another
topic.
