Support xrefs via Shepherd

Ok, so I had look at the output from Shepherd… unfortunately, the API is not very customizable, leading to massive downloads. For example the HTML spec is 1MB of JSON… and DOM is 400Kb. It’s too much to send down to the client (specially phones)… so, what would be great would be to bring in data for known specs into spec ref, then allow smarter queries like:

?spec=dom&terms=fire an event,the foo,the bar

And get back just the xrefs needed.

{
    "dom": {
      "fire an event": "#concept-event-fire",
      "the bar": null,
     }
}

Probably need a bit more detail, like returning the “type” (so to correctly style)… but you get the idea.

[marcoscaceres]

On 7 Jan 2017, at 7:59 am, Tab Atkins Jr. [e-mail] wrote:

No, Shepherd’s current design (just send all the information down) is ideal for Bikeshed, as it creates and uses a full database of its own offline. I very intentionally designed Bikeshed to not require any network traffic when processing (unless you use one of the optional features that require it).

I’m not sure that getting Bikeshed-equivalent linking out of Shepherd is really possible, without Shepherd reproducing Bikeshed’s smart linking logic (which is continually getting tweaked, too). Cross-spec linking is really incompatible with client-side JS. 😕

Oh! Them’s fighting words, Tab. No one questions the honour of my beloved JS!

Now i have to do it! 😎

But seriously, if the web platform can’t do it - then that’s an opportunity to fix stuff in the platform. I’m maybe being overly optimistic, but I can’t see anything in Shepherd’s output that would prevent this from working in JS.

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[marcoscaceres]

Closed by https://github.com/sidvishnoi/respec-xref-route/