Ideas
Everybody loves to tinker. Ideas on future development should go here.
Autogsdoc and wiki syntax
The class documentation should have simpler syntax than XML. For example a wiki-like syntax, where references would be enclosed in [[ and ]] for the ObjectiveC message sends, one should prefix the first [ by a backslash. Like: \[[alloc] init].
Italics should be marked by ''italics'', bold by '''bold''' (mediawiki) or by __bold__ (phpwiki)
The references should be: [[Class:class_name]], [[Method:Class:methodName:]], [[framework:framework name in local documentation namespace]]
The requirement of specificaly marking instance variables should be reconsidered. Italics should be used instead. Firstly, it is already common. Secondly, there is no need to preserve an information in the documentation that specified word is a function argument or an instance variable. The information is obvious to the reader from context and already used different font.
</nowiki>
XML is a bit complicated for such simple task as documentation.
I'd suggest something like ruby's rdoc [1] --Frederik 19:34, 27 Feb 2005 (CET)
Doxygen
It does most of the cross-referencing automatically and is way more powerful.
The SideStep (and Etoile?) people and libFoundation already use Doxygen. See http://libfoundation.opendarwin.org/docs/ for libFoundation. To see how the GNUstep source tree documentation looks like, first install Doxygen, then do:
cd /tmp svn co svn://svn.gna.org/svn/sidestep/trunk sidestep cd sidestep <edit Doxyfile.in -> replace "@DOTDIR@" by the path containing the dot tool. If you don't have graphviz installed, set HAVE_DOT to NO instead. You can also use 'doxywizard <file>' to configure stuff.> doxygen Doxyfile.in
and wait for it to finish (it generates no output except warnings). Madleser 16:17, 2 October 2006 (CEST)
New Approach to a Code Editor
Developers should focus on development and not mess with files. Synchronizing header files with source files is no fun, neither is having to jump around for documentation of different methods and such. See http://ide.roard.com/wakka.php?wiki=Goals for some brainstorming on this topic.