A Rant For Reliable Documentation

May 21st, 2008 Posted by Don Albrecht

I’m a javascript harlot and proud of it. I espouse no allegiance to any particular framework, widget or philosophy and pride myself n my ability to select the best tools for the job based on a project’s unique constraints. I find this puts me in a slightly unique position among developers. I don’t carry the deep and intimate details of the framework in my brain, instead I prefer to maintain a much shallower depth of understanding. I prefer road maps and traffic advisories to in depth aboriginal understanding.

This is why I was affected so severely by what seems to superficially be a minor inconvenience: the Scriptaculous wiki outage. Scriptaculous has already lagged behind prototype in its depth of documentation. This makes sense, after all, much of the heavy lifting and complex API’s are handled by prototype so an extensive documentation isn’t really necessary. For most developers, a few well executed demo implementations of the key features are all we need to get the job done. In fact, well executed demo implementations are especially critical for a framework like scriptaculous where many of the key features require complex implementation and are likely to be only used once or twice per project and not necessarily referenced day in and day out as the project comes together.

Last week, I was tasked to work on just such a feature. We new the type ahead find was straightforward to implement given the Scriptaculous documentation. We also knew that it was fundamentally gravy. Sure, the feature was important to the end product and would mean much of the difference between user frustration and adoption, but It was also significantly less important than some other items like successfully storing to the database, authentication and form processing. In short, we put it off to the end as I’m sure many developers would.

Unfortunately, the documentation was gone when we needed it. The wiki outage had hosed the Scriptaculous hosted media wiki instance and the page we needed was simply missing from the new system. During a several minute minor panic we tried the various internet archives and similar sites in a desperate attempt to find a new solution with negligible success. Eventually we found the documentation we needed.

To Scriptaculous’s credit it was in a surprisingly logical place and well done. Turns out that scriptaculous has wonderful self documentation as part of the functional tests / unit tests suite. These test files provided us with solid demonstrations of features we were looking to use for this project.

There’s no doubt in my mind that a software component’s single biggest asset is its documentation. This is as much a feature as an ultra-fast query selector or smoothly transitioning widget. Scriptaculous provides powerful documentation in a slightly unlikely place but doesn’t provide decent bread crumbs to its existence from the frameworks public site. Given the critical nature of such documentation, It would be nice if it integrated in to the public site or atleast minimally referenced as a resource.