Don’t forget your hard hat…
I’ve started to work on reorganizing the XPCOM interface documentation on the Mozilla Developer Center. I’m going through every interface reference document, checking the tags, and moving them all into a new subtree in the documentation, rooted at “en/XPCOM Interface Reference”. Things are likely to be dusty for a while while I work on that.
I’ll be writing a script sometime in the next few days that will automatically populate the root page for the reference based on the subpages, so that we won’t have to manually add things to it. I’m tinkering with some ideas on that front.
I’m also tagging articles as I look at them with tags such as “NeedsContent” or “NeedsMarkupWork” and so forth, so that we can go back and fix articles that need revision work.
I know we already have an “XPCOM API Reference”; I decided that I’d rather start over than try to figure out where we left off with that, so everything is going to migrate into the newer setup from there.
Once the initial migration is done, there are two major chores that will need doing.
First, we need to get the rest of the interfaces documented. There are tons of them that aren’t yet.
Second, we need to go through and clean up the existing documents. Some are fine as they are, others are barely even a shell, and some are literally “Hey, we need to write something here” pages. Ugh. Hopefully the tagging work I’m doing will make it easier to go through all of these and clean them up.
Anyway, in the meantime, there’ll be some funny redirects and the like going on, I expect, and a flood of entries in the change history for MDC.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:56 AM
Eric,
I’ve got all the xpcom data (i.e., xpidl + cpp implementations) in my dxr database, if you want to use it somehow. It’s an sqlite db. Email if you want some help using these static analysis tools to mine info.
Dave
July 14th, 2009 at 3:45 PM
It would be great if it wasn’t called “XPCOM Interface Reference” and was instead just called “Interface Reference”. Unless you’re referring specifically to interfaces that relate directly to XPCOM, this only tends to confuse as the fact that xpcom is used for memory and component management is only of marginal relevance.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:49 PM
Neil — that’s a good point; I’ll rename it soon.
Dave — not sure how I’ll use that, but I’m sure it’ll come in handy. I’ll talk to you when I’m ready to start working on new content.