Intermediate Doc Format

Ethan McCue ethan at mccue.dev
Wed Aug 20 13:20:16 UTC 2025


Apologies in advance for the shallowness of thought.

Javadoc takes as input sources and produces as output html. When you get
the docs for your JDK it comes with a nice index page documenting all the
modules within.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/24/docs/api/index.html

When you make docs for a library, however, it starts to get a lot more
split up.

Is it at all feasible for javadoc to not produce html as its output but to
instead produce a serialized representation of the doc-info extracted from
sources? So instead of running javadoc on all the sources in the jdk and
then in libraries you could have jmods

java.base.jmod/
  classes/
    ...
  ...
  docs/
    java.base.docinfo.json
other.library/
  ...
  docs/
    other.library.docinfo.json

And as part of a linkage step produce one mega page with all the javadoc
info from all the libraries you are using.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/javadoc-dev/attachments/20250820/c07d8b26/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the javadoc-dev mailing list