I think it's time to make documentation available to other programs (especially editors) in a nice format to work with, hence why not PHP as the first? It will be great to have an API for getting documentation. The actual doc's url structure is really good and I think will be relatively easy to set up said API (from a software point-of-view at least).
Something like this: http://php.net/function.file_exists*.json* -> { valid: true, type: "function", name: "file_exists", args: [ { n: "filename", t: "string", //d: "eventually default value", //"&": true -> passed as reference //v: "X.x" for argument introduced since an X.x version doc: "Path to the file or directory.\nOn windows, use `\/\/computername\/share\/filename` or `\\\\computername\\share\\filename` to check files on network shares." } ], ret: { type: "bool", doc: "Returns **TRUE** if the file or directory specified by filename exists; FALSE otherwise." }, notes: [ "This function will return **FALSE** for symlinks pointing to non-existing files.", "The check is done using the real UID/GID instead of the effective one.", "Because PHP's integer type is signed and many platforms use 32bit integers, some filesystem functions may return unexpected results for files which are larger than 2GB." ], warns: [ "This function returns FALSE for files inaccessible due to safe mode restrictions. However these files still can be included if they are located in safe_mode_include_dir." ] } For an invalid request: {valid: false} will be enough It will also be nice to have a call for getting all the functions' name for a given version, in alphabetical order, such as: http://php.net/5.3/functions.json -> ["array","array_keys", /*, ...*/ ] So will be easy for editors to cache it and implement an always-updated and precise autocomplete Hope you like this idea, Cheers :)
