Seeking areas of little or weak documentation

I would hate to see YAMM (Yet Another Maxima Manual).  In this day & age, paper isn't where it's at; you want everything to on-line.

It should be possible _within Maxima itself_ to bring up one or more web pages in your web browser which include function definitions, examples, source code, etc.  Javascript is sufficiently powerful to do a lot, and with HTML5 becoming available momentarily, a web-based interface will allow real-time hardware-accelerated shaded animated graphics from within Maxima.  The newest generation of browsers have just-in-time compilers for Javascript, so javascript is actually pretty zippy.  Check out Microsoft's beta browser, for example.

If you want to look at better on-line documentation, look at the Javascript pages at

http://www.w3schools.com/js/

They aren't perfect, but they're pretty good, and they're Google searchable, which helps enormously.

P.S., I would love to replace the existing Maxima front-end with a browser-based one, so that I could utilize some of the interactive javascript graphical tools -- e.g., JSXGraph.

At 01:24 PM 3/21/2011, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
>I think just about any topic in Maxima could benefit from intelligent documentation.
>
>Today, each section (e.g. polynomials) is organized alphabetically by function.  That is fine if you know what function you want, but very hard to use if you're trying to get something accomplished and don't know how.  The problem is that it's not clear what resources a tech writer could use to write this up in a goal-oriented way.  There is lots of useful information in the mailing list archives, but it is *a lot* of material.
>
>                -s
>
>On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 16:21, Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:
>Sol Lederman wrote:
>
>> Henry and Richard,
>>
>> Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly to my post.
>>
>> I see a common thread in your responses -- that there are areas of Maxima
>> where information is not well organized/catalogued.
>
>One of the areas which would benefit from a better documentation is the part
>36, Rules and patterns. This is a difficult subject, and frequently
>questions about it appear in this forum. By collecting all this information,
>and playing with the program, perhaps one could enhance this documentation.
>This is a set of features which work very well in Mathematica and are very
>well documented in the Mathematica book. This perhaps could help as example.
>Robert Dodier is the expert on these features, he certainly could also help.
>
>In another department, R. Toy has recently added lbfgs to the share
>directory. I suppose this is related to
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFGS_method
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-BFGS
>but there is zero documentation. this would be a target for experimentation
>and documentation on a limited domain.
>
>I would say the same for colnew but i am working on it, because i have
>special interest on this program.
>
>There are other interesting programs which are presently broken such as
>share/gentran. Dan Stanger is working on that, probably it will be an
>interesting target of documentation  because gentran functionality is nice.
>
>--
>Michel Talon