as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

The webdocs.org documentation repository (via Simon Willison) seems like a vaguely neat thing; a gathering of Python documentation. I have a bit of a flaw with it, though; I wondered how it was done -- do they manually update it, are they picking up some kind of XML summaries from the author's sites, what -- so I looked at the source. And it is completely unhelpful in this regard. This is perhaps a more worrying aspect of the web services trend -- you've got no way of looking at the information you get back, because all the client-side code you get boils down to a couple of RPC requests and some processing code rather than actually containing the data itself. I suppose that that's just a consequence of the way things are going. -----