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Scaladoc2 suggestion to help with navigation to supertypes

1 reply
Cay Horstmann
Joined: 2009-09-04,
User offline. Last seen 42 years 45 weeks ago.

I am putting this on scala-internals because I was previously
admonished not to put scaladoc2 issues on scala-user.

I am preparing a workshop for CS instructors interested in using Scala
for college courses. I am boldly using 2.8, which means scaladoc2. And
here is my problem. I want to go over some basic collections, such as
ArrayBuffer. But I can't figure out how to show the scaladoc2 page
without losing face.

People will want to know the supertypes and their purpose. They will
want to *navigate* to them. That's much more important than the
hide/show behavior which is pretty worthless for a class with many
members and many supertypes (such as ArrayBuffer).

ArrayBuffer is particularly embarrassing because it has two supertypes
Seq that appear indistinguishable. There is simply no way of finding
out what each of them is in the ArrayBuffer scaladoc2 page.

So, here is my constructive suggestion.

In the list of supertypes, make each type act like any other clickable
type, i.e. on mouse over show the package name and on click follow the
link to the type's page. AFTER each of the supertypes, put a checkbox
(or some other doohickey if you dislike checkboxes) to toggle the
show/hide status. Yes, it takes a small amount of additional real
estate, but it will be a HUGE improvement for usability.

Thanks,

Cay

dcsobral
Joined: 2009-04-23,
User offline. Last seen 38 weeks 5 days ago.
Re: Scaladoc2 suggestion to help with navigation to supertypes
You do realize you can click on the supertypes mentioned in the declaration itself, right below the class name, don't you?   I'll beg to differ regarding the class toggling, though your suggestion has merit.

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Cay Horstmann <cay.horstmann@gmail.com> wrote:
I am putting this on scala-internals because I was previously
admonished not to put scaladoc2 issues on scala-user.

I am preparing a workshop for CS instructors interested in using Scala
for college courses. I am boldly using 2.8, which means scaladoc2. And
here is my problem. I want to go over some basic collections, such as
ArrayBuffer. But I can't figure out how to show the scaladoc2 page
without losing face.

People will want to know the supertypes and their purpose. They will
want to *navigate* to them. That's much more important than the
hide/show behavior which is pretty worthless for a class with many
members and many supertypes (such as ArrayBuffer).

ArrayBuffer is particularly embarrassing because it has two supertypes
Seq that appear indistinguishable. There is simply no way of finding
out what each of them is in the ArrayBuffer scaladoc2 page.

So, here is my constructive suggestion.

In the list of supertypes, make each type act like any other clickable
type, i.e. on mouse over show the package name and on click follow the
link to the type's page. AFTER each of the supertypes, put a checkbox
(or some other doohickey if you dislike checkboxes) to toggle the
show/hide status. Yes, it takes a small amount of additional real
estate, but it will be a HUGE improvement for usability.

Thanks,

Cay



--
Daniel C. Sobral

I travel to the future all the time.

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