Automatic stubs for JavaScript APIs

Hi,

I chatted with Eliott this week on a potentially useful tool I've built
that could be used to generate stubs for JavaScript API pages, based on
how they're defined in specs (using WebIDL).

As some of you may know, browser JavaScript APIs are described in a
formal language called WebIDL that lets spec authors describe which
properties and methods a given JavaScript interface exposes.

As part of my (irregular) work on the W3C cheatsheet:
http://www.w3.org/2009/cheatsheet/
I built a ad-hoc workflow that takes an spec written in HTML, extracts
the WebIDL fragments, and turn them into (somewhat) human-readable
content that can then be displayed in the said cheatsheet.

I won't get into the details of that workflow, but the most motivated
readers can try to pull the pieces together from:
https://github.com/dontcallmedom/w3c-cheatsheet/ esp.
https://github.com/dontcallmedom/w3c-cheatsheet/commit/090e9b929e081fcfd444094a2174f8f5b5d3c861

I could reasonably easily adapt that workflow to make it generate
mediawiki markup, which could be used as stubs for a large number of
APIs.

I understand that for the most popular APIs, the preferred approach will
be to import existing content, but hopefully such an automatic approach
could help bootstrap the work on the APIs in which no or little content
already exists.

Is this of interest? If so, what is the best way to proceed with that
idea?

Dom

Received on Friday, 15 November 2013 09:44:57 UTC