How to document actions
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Detailed action doc lives in trunk/doc/user/09_appendix/action_src in
almost-html files. There is no html header and the standard tags in use
are restricted to: b, i, p, pre, ul, li, table, tr, td.
There are a few extra, non-standard tags:
- argname names an argument of the current action
- actname links to another action; actname is all lowercase
The name of the file should be actname.html.
Documentation policy:
- do not document the trivial - do not write alibi docs. We do not want
action doc to just repeat the syntax description. Please explore
what the action does, all aspects, all use cases; see if the syntax
help string already covers everything and the action is trivial to use;
if so, the action does not need any more documentation
- after creating the html doc, please add a
/* DOC: actname.html */
comment above the action function in the source code
- the doc is high level in the sense that it should tell the basic ideas
behind the action, how to use it, what it is for
- it should not tell much about what bigger scheme it fits in (that's
even higher level, plugin doc; but should cross link relevant sibling
actions)
- it should not repeat low level info (e.g. enumerate possible arguments
from the syntax string) if no extra info is added
- do not do custom styling, the doc format is unified