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[autogsdoc] should be refactored to support multiple output formats

Open gcasa opened this issue 1 year ago • 3 comments
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As it stands autogsdoc is an excellent tool for generating documentation from GNUstep's headers, but it is limited to HTML output. Indeed, it uses some antiquated tags from older versions of HTML, namely and to name a few. I see the following issues:

  1. The current implementation of HTML generation needs to be reviewed and updated... get rid of older tags, make the generated HTML more capable of having CSS applied
  2. The generation itself needs to be looked at such that other formats could be generated for example: Markdown or formats capable of being parsed by other document generators
  3. Code cleanup

GC

gcasa avatar Jul 24 '24 16:07 gcasa

Umm ... autogsdoc has never been limited to HTML output. It was designed from scratch to produce XML (specifically the gsdoc grammar in xml), on the assumption that people could xslt (or other mechanisms) to convert the XML to other formats as required, but with an extra phase to directly produce HTML from the XML. Of course anyone is welcome to provide other styles of output. That being said, the generated HTML is old fashioned, and would definitely benefit from updating, as suggested, by someone familiar with the use of CSS.

rfm avatar Jul 25 '24 16:07 rfm

Umm ... autogsdoc has never been limited to HTML output. It was designed from scratch to produce XML (specifically the gsdoc grammar in xml), on the assumption that people could xslt (or other mechanisms) to convert the XML to other formats as required, but with an extra phase to directly produce HTML from the XML. Of course anyone is welcome to provide other styles of output. That being said, the generated HTML is old fashioned, and would definitely benefit from updating, as suggested, by someone familiar with the use of CSS.

AH SWEET!!! That's hugely exciting. I think then, the HTML should be updated and... we should create parsers to output different formats. Nice! :). I wasn't sure if autogsdoc generated the HTML directly or not I have never worked on that tool. I apologize for my misunderstanding.

gcasa avatar Jul 25 '24 17:07 gcasa

HTML output has been quite updated... as far as I checked, it is HTML5 compliant, but we might want to run some check tool on it to be sure some older tag/style didn't slip in.

rmottola avatar Nov 13 '24 18:11 rmottola