Thoughs on LiveDocs for Scorpio
ColdFusionI started using ColdFusion on version 3.1 and the documentation was excellent. CF has now grown up to version 7 and the documentation, with a few small exceptions, is still excellent. The livedocs for Version 7, however, was a step backwards. The big mistake was making it a book online and not online documentation.
With Scorpio around the corner this is what I would like to see in LiveDocs:
- No online book! Instead a page for each tag or function in CFML reference and the same for the other books. For two reasons; 1) it will be easier and quicker to find something and b) it will be possible to bookmark, link to or email. I've lost track of the number of times I've tried to do the latter but not been able to.
- Color coded code. Every blog now has color coded code and its time for LiveDocs to do the same.
- An AJAX lookup similar to CFQuickDocs. Ideally this would be in the menu bar at the top of each page.
And here is my dream list/ideas:
- Screenshots of the output of code where it makes sense, I'm thinking of tags like cfdump, cfchart, cfgrid, etc.
- Provide the CFML Reference in some sort of XML format. Jake Munson the creator of CFQuickDocs had to do a screen scrape of LiveDocs to get the content. If the CFML Reference was available in XML format it would also be easier to import into various editors which could only be good for CF.
- Incoporate Ben Forta's IM bot on to the livedocs.adobe.com website. This would both make it easier to find tags/functions and would also show off CFML Event Gateways.
Allen said:
I'm with you on this one. For a paid product to have an advantage over open source I want things that save me time. Having one spot to go for great documentation is one of those things.
Jake Munson said:
I also agree. I, for one, would not be the least bit sad to see livedocs dramatically improved, to the point that CFQuickDocs usage drops. I built the tool to make things easier, but it would be a lot better if the official docs were quick and easy. Especially since CFQuickDocs doesn't contain all of livedocs, just the cf tags and functions.
Sean Corfield said:
Don't forget that there are two very distinct pieces to this puzzle: the (arbitrary) HTML documentation produced by the product team and the "LiveDocs" machinery itself. The latter is completely independent of the format of the docs themselves - it just provide comment functionality (and RSS feeds). Most all of the complaints I see about the LiveDocs site are really about the HTML documentation pack produced by the product teams.
Sam Farmer said:
I agree Sean, you obviously have more insight into which team is responsible for what. As I noted the documentation itself is excellent. The LiveDocs machinery is not.
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