One of our doc writers, Richard, blogged about a project I helped out with.  It’s a nice index of compiler options sorted and arranged by many different aspects.  The source is stored in an XML document, and it’s processed using style sheets into a tree of HTML files.  We tried forever to  dynamically load the XML file and apply different style sheets to it, but we couldn’t get around the old  “can’t load foreign files” problem in html and javascript.  I kind of hacked around this in my bookmarks page, which I wrote a while back as a Javascript learning experience. The amount of pain and hackery that I needed to get that working was terrible.  The existing set of pages get generated by Kami or I from a shell script, but then they need to be “fiddled with” to meet the style criteria for developers.sun.com.  That process can sometimes take forever depending on the workload of the people who have to do the fiddling, and the process will have to be done the next time we post an update, unless we change our setup.   In the next version of the pages, I’m hoping we can set it all up in one large XHTML file, and use some Javascript menus to choose a style sheet to be applied dynamically.  We’ll still probably have to tweak the new page (once!) to meet the right style guides, but from then on, it should be easy to keep it up to date.  If the developers.sun.com web site doesn’t want Javascript running loose, we can post the index someplace else.  So if you have any feedback on the structure or contents, let me know.  But don’t get me started on deep-linking into the manuals on docs.sun.com, that was a huge hack to get working, and it’s not officially supported.

Update: I updated the link for the Sun Studio 12 compilers.