doclint in jdk8

http://blog.joda.org/2014/02/turning-off-doclint-in-jdk-8-javadoc.html

Turning off doclint in JDK 8 Javadoc

 

JDK 8 includes many updates, but one is I suspect going to cause quite a few complaints - doclint for Javadoc.

Javadoc doclint

Documentation is not something most developers like writing. With Java, we were fortunate to have the Javadoc toolset built in and easy to access from day one. As such, writing Javadoc is a standard part of most developers life.

The Javadoc comments in source code use a mixture of tags, starting with @, and HTML to allow the developer to express their comment and format it nicely.

Up to JDK 7, the Javadoc tool was pretty lenient. As a developer, you could write anything that vaguely resembled HTML and the tool would rarely complain beyond warnings. Thus you could have @link references that were inaccurate (such as due to refactoring) and the tool would simply provide a warning.

With JDK 8, a new part has been added to Javadoc called doclint and it changes that friendly behaviour. In particular, the tool aim to get conforming W3C HTML 4.01 HTML (despite the fact that humans are very bad at matching conformance wrt HTML).

With JDK 8, you are unable to get Javadoc unless your tool meets the standards of doclint. Some of its rules are:

• no self-closed HTML tags, such as <br /> or <a id="x" />
• no unclosed HTML tags, such as <ul> without matching </ul>
• no invalid HTML end tags, such as </br>
• no invalid HTML attributes, based on doclint's interpretation of W3C HTML 4.01
• no duplicate HTML id attribute
• no empty HTML href attribute
• no incorrectly nested headers, such as class documentation must have <h3>, not <h4>
• no invalid HTML tags, such as List<String> (where you forgot to escape using &lt;)
• no broken @link references
• no broken @param references, they must match the actual parameter name
• no broken @throws references, the first word must be a class name

Note that these are errors, not warnings. Break the rules and you get no Javadoc output.

In my opinion, this is way too strict to be the default. I have no problem with such a tool existing in Javadoc, but given the history of Javadoc, errors like this should be opt-in, not opt-out. Its far better to get slightly broken Javadoc than no Javadoc.

I also haven't been able to find a list of the rules, which makes life hard. At least we can see the source code to reverse engineer them.

Turning off doclint

The magic incantation you need is -Xdoclint:none. This goes on the command line invoking Javadoc.

If you are running from maven, you need to use the additionalparam setting, as per the manual. Either add it as a global property:

  <properties>
    <additionalparam>-Xdoclint:none</additionalparam>
  </properties>

or add it to the maven-javadoc-plugin:

  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
      <configuration>
        <additionalparam>-Xdoclint:none</additionalparam>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>

Ant also uses additionalparam to pass in -Xdoclint:none, see the manual.

Gradle does not expose additionalparam but Tim Yates and Cedric Champeau advise of this solution:

  if (JavaVersion.current().isJava8Compatible()) {
    allprojects {
      tasks.withType(Javadoc) {
        options.addStringOption('Xdoclint:none', '-quiet')
      }
    }
  }

See also the Gradle manual.

Summary

I don't mind doclint existing, but there is no way that it should be turned on to error mode by default. Getting some Javadoc produced without hassle is far more important than pandering to the doclint style checks. In addition, it is very heavy handed with what it defines to be errors, rejecting plenty of HTML that works perfectly fine in a browser.

I've asked the maven team to disable doclint by default, and I'd suggest the same to Ant and Gradle. Unfortunately, the Oracle team seem convinced that they've made the right choice with errors by default and their use of strict HTML.

Comments welcome, but please note that non-specific "it didn't work for me" comments should be at Stack Overflow or Java Ranch, not here!

Posted by Stephen Colebourne at 23:42

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Tags: java8

26 comments:

1. 
   James Keesey9 February 2014 at 03:04

   How can they possibly consider this an acceptible change? Ths amount of currently valid documentation that will fail now will be immense. I know that much of my own documentation will be invalid as I write XHTML (I.e. I always close all tags). Some editors will not format Javadoc properly if the tags aren't closed.

   So now, many, possibly most, developers will turn doclint off and never turn it back on again negating its benefits.

   Reply

2. 
   Anonymous9 February 2014 at 06:37

   Surely they should be enforcing a subset of HTML5, not HTML4.01?

   As all modern browsers support a fair chunk of HTML5.

   Reply

3. 
   Geoffrey De Smet9 February 2014 at 11:53

   I
   think it's a good thing they decided to fail-fast on invalid javadocs.
   But since when are "self-closed HTML tags, such as <br />"
   invalid?

   Reply

   Replies

    

    
4. 
   Anonymous9 February 2014 at 12:59

   <br /> is invalid in HTML4, and has always been. HTML is not XML. Browsers are very lenient, of course.

   This
   stems from a complicated relationship between HTML and XHTML. An old
   but relevant article on the subject: http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

   HTML5
   fixes this issue (both <br> and <br /> are fine, among
   thousands of other such things), so it's a mystery why Javadoc insists
   on HTML4.

5. 
   Unknown30 June 2014 at 04:42

   The
   excuse they give in the docs is that they use frameset, but that excuse
   is invalid for two reasons: (1) surely even frameset works in HTML5;
   (2) even if it didn't, surely that one page with the frameset could be
   HTML4 while the rest could be HTML5.

6.  

   Reply
7. 
   Geoffrey De Smet10 February 2014 at 09:42

   Agreed:
   they need to support a subset of HTML 5, not HTML 4, especially since
   they fail-fast by default and HTML 4 doesn't support
   .

   But the decision to fail-fast by default on invalid input is a good decision I think.

   Reply

8. 
   Werner Keil19 March 2014 at 00:09

   Looks like it won't work with Maven 3.0.4, what is the minimum Maven and Java 8 build to actually accept -Xdoclint:none?

   Besides
   styling and font of Java 8 JavaDoc look extremely bad in every browser,
   even the Spec Leads of some Platform JSRs avoid it for that reason...

   Reply

   Replies

    

    
9. 
   Werner Keil25 March 2014 at 13:35

   I applied both in a POM and it ended up working with a Maven 3.x version and Java 8 close to Final.
   JavaDoc
   is still bad and someone from the Frontend team at Oracle shared the
   issue. The problem is, that almost every major browser shows many
   characters like "a" as an ugly, unreadable chunk (the upper part of the
   letter running into the lower one like it's melting ;-/ ) So far Firefox
   seems to handle it best, but all other browsers I checked (Chrome, IE,
   Opera) look horrible.

10.  

    Reply
11. 
    Anonymous20 March 2014 at 10:36

    I've seen on StackOverflow (link)
    that with JDK8 you must now add either a caption or a summary if you
    use HTML tables inside Javadoc comments. Why would this be required?
    Isn't a <table> without a caption or a summary perfectly legal
    HTML?

    Reply

    Replies

     

     
12. 
    Stephen Colebourne20 March 2014 at 20:29

    Looks
    like its an accessibility feature.
    http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_table_summary.asp . Big corporates
    like Oracle tend to worry about such things.

13.  

    Reply
14. 
    Guy McArthur27 March 2014 at 23:40

    There is an XML flavor of HTML 4 (but not HTML5) called XHTML 1.0, so something like
    might well be what you intended to output....

    Reply

15. 
    Nathan Green9 April 2014 at 03:24

    I
    wish they'd ditch HTML in favor of markdown or wiki syntax or
    something. I have to be able to read the docs in source before they get
    stuffed into a full-blown HTML page, and raw HTML is not human-friendly
    at all. I see too much un- and under-commented code as it is: all this
    does is create a disincentive to write Javadoc at all. It would make
    more sense to fail when public classes lack Javadocs entirely than to do
    what they've done.

    Reply

    Replies

     

     
16. 
    Anonymous28 July 2015 at 02:48

    +1. Never gonna happen though.

17. 
    Wim Deblauwe13 November 2015 at 10:01

    This is possible: http://asciidoctor.org/news/2013/06/03/asciidoclet-announcement/

18.  

    Reply
19. 
    Anonymous3 May 2014 at 09:28

    -Xdoclint:none is an invalid option in pre-8 Javadoc

    javadoc: error - invalid flag: -Xdoclint:none

    Is there a backwards-compatible way to maintain the former behaviour?

    Reply

20. 
    Unknown30 May 2014 at 04:43

    I'm
    so glad they upgraded this stuff to error status. Sure, I had to fix
    140 or so cases where it was just a missing caption on a table, but it
    found 7 legit issues of broken links, incorrect tags, invalid URLs, etc.

    Worth it!

    Reply

21. 
    Anonymous4 June 2014 at 14:12

    Seems that the code generated by xjc is not compliant with these new errors.

    Reply

    Replies

     

     
22. 
    Anonymous23 July 2014 at 14:53

    This!
    I like the idea of cleaning up our JavaDocs, but I don't want to
    manually change auto-generated XJC Java files. Since I can't correctly
    fix the XJC generated Java files the whole thing feels pointless.

23.  

    Reply
24. 
    Anonymous4 July 2014 at 11:56

    Also
    the wsimport tool from JDK8 generates code which is not compatible with
    this new regime. It seems the tools in JDK8 package have not been
    tested for doclint compliance.

    Reply

    Replies

     

     
25. 
    Anonymous15 September 2014 at 20:12

    Yup. Event OpenJDK 8 itself disables doclint for large parts of the build :)

    http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/build-dev/2013-December/011435.html

26.  

    Reply
27. 
    Anonymous7 November 2014 at 10:29

    See https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/blob/master/pom.xml#L247-L255
    and https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/blob/master/pom.xml#L367-L382

    for a backwards compatible way of doing this

    Reply

    Replies

     

     
28. 
    Anonymous27 November 2014 at 10:12

    Saved my day!

29. 
    Anonymous27 April 2015 at 12:12

    I doesn't work for jdk7, but at least it works for jdk8

30.  

    Reply
31. 
    turbanoff6 August 2015 at 00:00

    Completely disable doclint is a bad advice. Javadoc doclint can be configured to enable/disable some types of checks.
    For example to disable all checks except html we can set additionalparam to
    -Xdoclint:syntax -Xdoclint:missing -Xdoclint:accessibility -Xdoclint:reference -Xdoclint:syntax
    http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/windows/javadoc.html

    Reply

32. 
    Ramya25 November 2015 at 06:28

    I
    dont see any restrictions to @default tags in java8. But my build fails
    saying AnnotationProcessing issue. Are there strict rules for it too,
    (@defaultpermissions)

    Reply

33. 
    Filip Hanik2 December 2015 at 16:38

    javadoc {
    logging.captureStandardError LogLevel.INFO
    logging.captureStandardOutput LogLevel.INFO // suppress "## warnings" message
    }

    Reply