Re: Documentation frustrations
Re: Documentation frustrations
- Subject: Re: Documentation frustrations
- From: Andy Lee <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 10:53:52 -0400
On Jul 10, 2005, at 1:16 AM, Scott Anguish wrote:
On Jul 10, 2005, at 12:54 AM, Andy Lee wrote:
I just submitted requests for the API search mode to do
substrings, not just prefixes, and for the full text search mode
to do stemming.
Actually...
Xcode's full-text search lets you search the installed
documentation for a word or phrase. You can enter a simple search
term, such as “button,” or create more advanced queries using
Boolean operators and wildcard characters. Xcode's full-text search
uses Apple's Search Kit technology, described in Adding Search to
Your Application (Preliminary)
I can use "button OR buttons", but a search engine with stemming
would have done the work for me.
Also, the SearchKit technology is not applied consistently. "API
Search" behaves differently than "Full-Text Search" -- a fact I
think, first of all, should be made clearer, because the strong
natural assumption is that they work the same. From what I can tell,
API Search only uses prefix searching (not general wildcards), and
only a single search term. So there is no way to discover, for
example, APIs related to HTML -- something that gets asked about on
this list from time to time.
For cases like this, general wildcard search is *more* important in
API Search than in Full-Text Search. We should be able to use the
fact that Apple names things well. This fact makes it possible to do
a pretty good approximation of a concept search by doing a substring
search. And there are times when I don't remember what some method
name started with.
Now, with the current Web documentation available as a download
to your local machine, I believe that Xcode's Documentation Window
is probably the best way to do that.
Someone in another post brought up the idea of an "iTunes for
documentation," which I thought was a great metaphor. It seems to me
that the Xcode doc window aims to be just that.
--Andy
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