[Javaweb-people] Info for javadoc?

[Nic Ferrier]

I haven't tried the info doclet yet (partly coz I can't find the damn
thing! where is it? anyone?) but it seems to me that Info is a good
fit for doing javadoc.

Here are my reasons for thinking this:

- info doesn't need a specific marker for paragraphs, that makes doc
  comments easier to read in the source file because they don't have
  spurious markers in them

- info has less markup burden generally, it's less messy to write
  @code{Iterator} than it is to write <code>Iterator</code>.

- info integrates with emacs better.

- info has nice forms for defining classes and methods which we should
  probably use.


I'm pretty sure that eventually we'll want to generate javadoc as
DocBook documents. 

But I'm also pretty sure that we could write a Info->DocBook
converter. I've just converted the CNI manual from DocBook to Info and
it was clearly the sort of thing that could be done mechanistically.

IMHO we could carry on using Info for javadoc comments in the source
file and have an advanced doclet that produced DocBook for us.


So, while we're on the subject of code standards... why don't we try
to get people to use Info for javadoc comments?


Nic