Show HN: Wayland Explorer – Easily read Wayland protocol documentation online

wayland.app

44 points·vially··6 comments

I've been trying to learn more about Wayland recently but most of the protocol documentation is found in XML files which makes for a poor reading experience.

Therefore I created a website which extracts the data from these protocols and publishes it in a format that's (arguably) better suited for reading.

https://wayland.app/protocols/

Source code on GitHub: https://github.com/vially/wayland-explorer

You should take a look at the Wayland book https://wayland-book.com/ Written by Drew who is the author of wlroots, a fairly popular Wayland compositor library.

It's beautiful!

Also it shows the power of publishing documentation in an easily-parsable format.

People love to hate on XML, but personally I think this kind of strictly typed structural information is where it excels even today

I can definitely see the point in choosing XML for the Wayland protocols for the reasons you've mentioned (e.g.: strictly typed information) because one of their purposes is to be able to easily generate bindings and libraries from them.

However, that still doesn't make them a good format for human consumption as in reading them as a reference. That was the main motivation for creating this website.

To clarify I think the site is great, is was simply commenting that the choice of XML was good exactly because it enables things like the site and binding generation.

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