public interface Taglet

The interface for a custom taglet supported by doclets such as the standard doclet. Custom taglets are used to handle custom tags in documentation comments; custom tags can be instantiated individually as either block tags, which appear at the end of a comment, or inline tags, which can appear within the main body of a documentation comment.

Each implementation of a taglet must provide a public no-argument constructor to be used by doclets to instantiate the taglet. A doclet will interact with classes implementing this interface as follows:

1. The doclet will create an instance of a taglet using the no-arg constructor of the taglet class.
2. Next, the doclet calls the init method with an appropriate environment and doclet.
3. Afterwards, the doclet calls getName, getAllowedLocations, and isInlineTag, to determine the characteristics of the tags supported by the taglet.
4. As appropriate, the doclet calls the toString method on the taglet object, giving it a list of tags and the element for which the tags are part of the element's documentation comment, from which the taglet can determine the string to be included in the documentation. The doclet will typically specify any requirements on the contents of the string that is returned.

If a taglet object is created and used without the above protocol being followed, then the taglet's behavior is not defined by this interface specification.