Minimalist Online Docmentation

Current status

For the past year and a half, MOD has been in full production use maintaining a handful of web sites. The current version is very usable and the documentation format is very stable, so further upgrades should simply improve the interpreter, and not make any of your existing documents obsolete.

You can probably get the best idea of what still needs to be done by taking a look at my to do list.

Stability

Short answer

Short answer: the format specification is very stable, and the interpreter has been in use for over a year. This means that you can write all of your documentation in MOD without having to worry (too much) about the format changing in a future version.

Longer answer

mod2html script

Currently, the software aspect of MOD comprises a single perl script, mod2html. This script goes through fairly constant development and changes in the way of bugfixes and optimizations. Since MOD consists of destination files that are recreated during each run though, the true test of stability lies in the status of the format itself:

I do have a wish list of items that I would like to implement in a future version of mod2html. These are unlikely to heavily affect the documentation format, though.

filesystem layout

The organizational design of the MOD format is very stable. I do not forsee any changes to the way that file and directory names and relationships are interpreted.

MOD tags

Tags and template variables are very close to being fully stable, but there are a couple that I'm still unhappy with, and I can't guarantee that a couple won't change in a future release. The most likely candidates are =me_first, =me_last, and =use_topic_index.

config file

This is fairly close to being stable as well. If anything, an optional variable or two may be added.

template variables

Again, fairly close to being stable, but I really don't like the term $Topic_Index$.