Python stagnating?

[Steve Holden]

"Aahz" <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote in message
news:abgqj3$r8v$1 at panix2.panix.com...
> In article <Xns9209AFA7A5F07chrislak at 209.249.90.101>,
> Chris  <chrisl_ak at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >on 09 May 2002, aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) spake thusly:
> >> In article <Xns92099FEFCC215chrislak at 209.249.90.101>,
> >> Chris <chrisl_ak at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>What would be really nice is an easily searchable, online manual. As a
> >>>user I really like the approach taken by the PHP manual, which
> >>>integrates easy searching, an auto search on the URL, and user
> >>>comments all in one place. Time to start digging around!
> >>
> >> There are two links on the Python docs page to search engines for the
> >> Python docs.
> >
> >I don't see those links, but I have found pydoc.org before.. but the user
> >comments can be viewed where? And I can get to it with a url string how?
> >And the downloadable PDF and HTML versions are where?
>
> http://www.python.org/doc/
> Look for "Search the docs".  Those other features aren't there, of
> course; I'm just pointing out that part of what you want is already
> available.
>
> I don't know what you mean by "user comments", but I'm suspicious that I
> wouldn't like it.  Downloadable HTML is right on the docs pages, and I'm
> not particularly fond of PDF for docs.

Some sites (MySQL comes to mind) have an HTML version of their documentation
available so that people can add insightful ("You may find on platform X
that...") and not-so-insigfhtful ("This product rocks!") comments to the
documentation. It would be simpler to link each doc page to a Wiki page - at
least then we wouldn't have to download the user comments unless we really
wanted to see them.

PDF is great if you're going to print documentation, which I do with lower
frequency as time goes by.

The searchable Windows help files (.chm) are useful, as is pydoc, as is
Thomas Heller's system (which has already been pointed out).

regards
 Steve
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Steve Holden                                 http://www.holdenweb.com/
Python Web Programming                http://pydish.holdenweb.com/pwp/
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