I always mean to dig into some popular Ruby gems or the Ruby core and read the code so I can improve my style.
But reading other peoples' code is tough - you can usually figure out what they're doing, but not necessarily why. This could change that.
It's like Genius (neé RapGenius) for code. That's a very good thing.
Literate style code[4] is another example of comments being a primary actor in programming.
If having long comments inline is a problem, most text editors could hypothetically be extended to have automatically collapsed/collapsible comments after the first line.
[1]: http://jashkenas.github.io/docco/
[2]: http://rtomayko.github.io/rocco/rocco.html
[3]: http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/coffee-script.htm...
[4]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jashkenas/journo/master/jo...
Ultimately, I think the two can and should coexist. The benefit (and, I guess, potential drawback) of the OmniRef/RapGenius approach is that it allows the whole world to comment on code (and perhaps ask questions as well) versus generators like Docco/Rocco that (of course) can only display comments in the code that are provided by the code's maintainers.
Genius.com has a feature where they have verified contributors - for example, Genius/GZA from Wu-Tang sometimes explains his own lyrics on there. Those comments are displayed much like everybody elses' comments but are given special visual prominence because they're assumed to be authoritative.
OmniRef could do something like that too - longform inline comments could be displayed on the sidebar (ala http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/coffee-script.htm...) as a part of the stream of comments, and given special precedence.
I'll add that to our to-do list. Thanks!