I do think that pearweb suffers from its current completely inflexible layout. One of the best things about tools like phpDocumentor is that if you dislike the layout, you can very easily take an existing template and modify it to create a different one, including re-formatting where information is displayed.
To change that would/will? require a *lot* of work :)
There is the wiki which is moving forward, the first test version should be available by mid-january. I believe it will help documentation a lot.
with docbook, this is completely impossible without learning an archaic dsssl language that nobody seems to be able to read. It's like the old medieval Catholic masses where the priests spoke in Latin and nobody had any idea what they were saying :).
Docbook layout can also be managed using XSL (not in the current peardoc afaik) and there is livedocs which gives more flexibility.
In my opinion, original ideas have no significance in coding. Original *work* does matter :). PEAR suffers from a glut of ideas and a dearth of people willing to go in the trenches and make them happen.
Having said this, perhaps your idea is the best way to document. In between a full-time concert performing career, maintaining my quartet's website, writing unit tests for PEAR 1.4.0 (I'm up to about 80% done with 467 tests written), continuing with fixes to pearweb, designing a new pear server for channels, upgrading the web installer, upgrading PEAR_PackageFileManager to support package.xml 2.0, doing any work at all on phpDocumentor, finishing unit tests on Game_Chess, and oh yeah living the rest of my life, I'm sure I can find time to redo the docs for PEAR_PackageFileManager that will provide exactly the same content but in a different more snazzy look.
Not :).
:)
Arnaud.