[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 54822] Web Inspector: generate protocol documentation based on IDL.

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54822





--- Comment #9 from Patrick Mueller <pmuellr at yahoo.com>  2011-02-21 05:35:15 PST ---
(In reply to comment #6)
> IDL is extremely limited in terms of markup for documentation 
> generation. I'd much rather have JSON as a source for both 
> generated code and the documentation. We only use IDL for 
> historical reasons + IDLParser is a part of the build on all ports.

I'm somewhat surprised to find that I actually like the IDL format.  
It's fairly concise, and turns out to be easy to parse.  I especially
like the trick of denoting call back parms as "out" parameters.

Although I love JSON as a transportable data structure format, I
really dislike writing it, and even reading it is kinda distasteful 
(this will change when there's a nice JSON viewer in all my "IDEs").

But it wouldn't be the end of the world for me if we switched to JSON.

> If we figure out how to run JavaScript in the build, we will be 
> able to use JSON source.

Well, WebKit nightlies build "jsc" (or they used to, or they can).  
Perhaps v8-based builds could be convinced to build a similar CLI, and 
we could parameterize the name of the executable.

But really, a lot of languages can read JSON.  Can't remember which
version of Python shipped JSON built-in, or the lowest level of Python
the night build requires.  But it turns out, for Python, JSON 
structures are also legal Python literals, so you can just eval() them 
anyway.

There's no reason to wait for a JavaScript interpreter if you want to
switch from IDL to JSON.  And if you're writing something new, I vote
for Python over Perl.

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