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The Design of Distributed Hyperlinked Programming Documentation

  • Conference paper
Book cover Hypermedia Design

Part of the book series: Workshops in Computing ((WORKSHOPS COMP.))

Abstract

HotJava is a World-Wide Web browser that adds dynamic behavior to hypertext access by supporting the downloading and execution of architecture-neutral, interactive applets from inside a Web page. HotJava is written in Java, a new object-oriented language and environment developed at Sun Microsystems.

This paper describes the design of the documentation for Java’s application programming interface (API), for display and distribution on the World-Wide Web. Following in the footsteps of the literate programming paradigm, the documentation was automatically generated from source code. We designed a syntax for documentation comments which are embedded in the source code and parsed by the Java compiler to produce HTML markup.

The display environment of the World-Wide-Web presented many challenging design requirements for readability, usability, and navigation. This paper discusses the design process, from augmenting the source code commenting syntax to designing the layout for the Web pages. The resulting product is a set of integrated Web pages which are hyperlinked, highly readable, and easily navigated. The API documentation was first published on the World-Wide Web in December of 1994.

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sun Microsystems Inc., 100 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, California, 94301, USA

    Lisa Friendly

Authors
  1. Lisa Friendly
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Knowledges Acquisition and Representation, LIRMM, 161 Rue Ada, 34 392, Montpellier Cedex 5, France

    S. Fraïssé , J. Nanard  & M. Nanard ,  & 

  2. Hypermedia Laboratory, Department of Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

    F. Garzotto

  3. Information Systems Department, Stern School of Business, New York University, 44 West 4th Street, New York, NY, 10012, USA

    T. Isakowitz

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© 1996 British Computer Society

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Friendly, L. (1996). The Design of Distributed Hyperlinked Programming Documentation. In: Fraïssé, S., Garzotto, F., Isakowitz, T., Nanard, J., Nanard, M. (eds) Hypermedia Design. Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3082-6_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3082-6_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-19985-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-3082-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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