I dug into the innards of javadocs and the Standard HTML Doclet recently to do 2 things:

1. decorate the standard doclet output with my custom annotations

2. generate ReStructuredText version of the custom annotations for a user manual

Its pretty cool that javadoc lets you customize output and all, but I've arrived at a few conclusions:

  1. the javadoc code was written by a bunch of idiots. It is a steaming pile of turd.
  2. it is difficult to extend, poorly designed, and the classnames make no bloody sense
  3. sounds crazy, but you need to COPY the ENTIRE standard doclet codebase in order to change the way it parses and displays files
  4. And yet.. its really not that difficult to write a doclet from scratch

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