olddoc - old-fashioned Ruby documentation generator

olddoc contains old-fashioned document generators for those who do not wish to impose bloated, new-fangled web cruft on their readers.

olddoc contains oldweb, an HTML generator without any images, frames, CSS, or JavaScript. It is designed for users of text-based browsers and/or low-bandwidth connections. oldweb focuses on text as it is the lowest common denominator for accessibility and compatibility with people and hardware.

Reasons

  • No CSS. Encouraging users to use CSS leads to problems like copy-paste hijacking: thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste External CSS also increases page load time as it often blocks page rendering. Asynchronous loading of CSS also causes accessibility problems as links/buttons may move as a user attempts to click.

  • No JavaScript. There is a constant barrage of security and client-side performance problems associated with it. It’s also unreasonable to expect users to rely on LibreJS and inspect every piece of JS they run.

  • No frames. Frames are an accessibility hassle and unfriendly to users of tiny screens on mobile devices and text-based browsers.

  • No images. Not everyone can view or afford bandwidth to load images. This also reduces the potential for security vulnerabilities as less code gets run. Furthermore, loading the wrong image in a public place can get you arrested (or worse).

Encourage readers to simplify and speed up their browsing experience. They can disable CSS, JavaScript, and images in their browser without missing out!

Usage

gem install olddoc cd $ANY_RDOC_USING_RUBY_PROJECT rdoc -f oldweb

You can also use olddoc to generate NEWS entries assuming you have git tags, a README file and .olddoc.yml

olddoc prepare

And “olddoc merge” to merge instances of “olddoc_placeholder” in an HTML file with HTML fragments generated with other tools such as pandoc(1). This requries an appropriately configured .olddoc.yml with a “merge_html” section see olddoc(5)

Source code

git clone 80x24.org/olddoc.git

Please use git-format-patch(1) and git-send-email(1) distributed with the git(7) suite for generating and sending patches. Please format pull requests with the git-request-pull(1) script (also distributed with git(7)) and send them via email to <[email protected]>

Contact

All feedback (comments, results, feature requests, bug reports, patches, pull-requests) via plain-text mail to the mailing list is very much appreciated.

Please send plain-text mail to the list at <[email protected]> HTML will not be read. olddoc is for GUI-phobes, by GUI-phobes. Mailing list archives available at 80x24.org/olddoc-public/ and nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.lang.ruby.olddoc No subscription will ever be necessary to post to the mailing list.

License

olddoc is copyrighted Free Software by all contributors, see logs in revision control for names and email addresses of all of them.

olddoc is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

olddoc is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, see www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt