AsciiDoc development is being continued under @asciidoctor.". By contrast, Markdown is supported by every editor, every static site generator, countless other applications, and is trivial to learn and to use. I searched for writing advice devoured works like Politics and the English Language and Strunk and White. It would be cool to have a documentation style that embeds reference in the tutorial à la Tufte notes. But Markdown/CommonMark supports it just fine. As a sidenote, i loathe autogenerated documentation and "docgen comments" in source code (and not only because they tend to enforce the "reference-only" approach). My biggest gripe with markdown for writing is its removal of single intentional newlines. and it helps me a ton. It’s also implicitly taken into account when a team builds a POC and reports the time spent on it. source code comments like what quite a few modern programming languages support; on that note, quite a few of those languages do use Markdown for inline docs). Even in companies where good documentation would raise revenue in a way that the sales team notices[1], someone still needs to write it and someone still needs to make the business case for writing it. For new user, unfamiliar with your service, you have to reassure them that they can undo everything. Paste a page link in and it continues to work even when the page moves or is retitled. If I'm already always in emacs, why not use something already right there, and is quick and easy? > Reports become historical records after 1-3 months. However note that the "source documentation system" i refer to is texinfo, not info. People working with software need these four different kinds of documentation at different times, in different circumstances - so software usually needs them all. What I really want is a Makefile that is also Markdown. Every time I need to do something in markdown I just pull up a cheatsheet and start typing. Mostly it collates all your endpoints more easily, generates clients for different languages, genearates an online documentation and test page that makes your service self describing, and can be published out to third parties that dont have access to your code. Example: The only problem with Microsoft is that they delight in rearranging their web site. You should reference particular code structures in the docs, and if the docs gets out of date it should. Those are generated off comments in code. https://github.com/HackerNews/API. Markdown has a lot of implementations (with some fragmentation, granted) and is adopted by many diverse projects outside the python sphere. Most useful when you're trying to get something done." If our programming languages were expressive enough, or if we had the talent to subtly wield those languages to express our intent, we would not need comments very much -- perhaps not at all. I think the zenith of reference documentation was the Windows API documentation on the MSDN CD's of the late 90's. It's been a while sine I booted one up, and I'd likely skip it if present. Perhaps that can be set up automatically as a CI job. A lot of the origin of this work is from Jacob Kaplan-Moss who did the original refactor of the Django documentation. I don't get it. Emmet is amazing and fun to use to create small chunks of content at a time. I meant it. It doesn't appear to me that the article linked in the rebuttal thread appears to address any of the points made in this article. The bigger hurdle of his students seems to be 'the first draft', the initial idea, the first words. Documentation should be about example code, which is perfectly fine in Markdown, you simply go: Rust documentation is amazing because of the toolchain support for documentation tests. There will be a nice, tidy example of how to use the library with a toy example. Readers can either hunt through for their specific problem (or something close enough to it to be adapted), or look through the range of applications to get new ideas for projects or products. I went into this article fully expecting to disagree but I think it makes a valid point. It's kinda sparse: ... For libraries that haven't done their top level documentation well, the examples folder will usually give a good demonstration of how to use the code, and they usually exist because that's the easiest thing for the library author, and the usually compile because they're automatically built by `cargo build`. It is absolutely useless and I would rather prefer no documentation than auto-generated. Semantic markup may be useful, but it's not, As others have said... if you have extra time to optimize how you write documentation, fine, but just get something written. > Nothing can be quite so helpful as a well-placed comment. What they need from me are the recipes. One last note is that every markup language has it's own special blemishes and issues. So what does one do? My two favorites by far are this Divio docs writing guide, and the Vue docs writing style guide [3]. For us, Asciidoc(tor) is the answer. Is that the kind of thing you mean? Plug-in a real-time stream of the most recent and highest trending Hacker News articles to your PubNub application. Edit: I suppose you could argue that release notes fall under the category of reference-oriented, but when I look at the guidelines for reference docs it's clear that the Divio people were thinking about API references. HackerNews7-svelte. Now, XSLT3 has maps, arrays, functions, higher order functions, and all sort of other goodies that people have come to expect from a modern programming language. Share link via Email Share link via Facebook Share link via Twitter Share link via Reddit Share link via Hacker News. Bad documentation covers obvious things very well, and doesn't cover tricky parts at all. Yeah, that's one of my ongoing frustrations as a maintainer :) I've always gone straight to a tool's docs when I want to start learning it. There's a desire path that engineers exhibit when writing docs. ebookc should cover your needs [1]. Additionally, I've started two years ago to work some of my readmes/tutorials with org-mode. It is in many ways better than markdown. Asciidoc(tor) is far easier to learn, read and write than RST (I have extensive experience with both). Log In. They criticize this within, but their criticism isn't particularly strong: sure, the point of Markdown is to write less HTML, but in this instance, the HTML is about as semantically concise as you can get: the quickest solution in any system. Maybe I will build it at some point. However I did learn a valuable lesson that day: never trust example code. Show HN: We wrote a book about building business applications in Go (threedots.tech) For anyone else, sure, spend a few days setting up LaTeX to actually produce PDFs (no, PostScript is not end user friendly) and a few weeks duplicating the Markdown you already knew how to write because you know ASCII formatting and basic HTML. We use it together with Antora, Asciidoc's answer to Sphinx. Open through command palette or cmd-alt-h. Hit escape to kill the view or select an article, hit enter, and read. Channel: hacker-news. With every support request you can multi variant test your explanation. It looks like he was at least partly inspired by this article [1]. [1]. That's fine. Why is documentation standard so low? Figure out how to parse .md (or whatever is the standard) instead of pretending others switch to your standard. > Developers: reStructuredText is better than .txt and .md because it has feature XYZ, and it's special syntax is great. This data set is Hacker News posts from the last 12 months (up to September 26 2016). If you need some more formatting and bells and whistles, then you graduate to something that supports macros and a is a more fully fledged tool (eg. Just like you can write bad code, you can write bad docs, not update them etc. For example, this is how you write a link in RST: Not sure why this is downvoted, as it is a purely informative comment, which might help the GP to implement something they need. The downside is, that it's only available to the extend in Emacs and other implementations are lacking many things. Download Process Hacker for free. Also I don't agree with the author's points about links in Markdown whatsoever. I used this resource as inspiration for when I had to rewrite the documentation for my JS library[1]. 3) Reference <- comes back to it regularly - A simple code snippet showing how easy it is to use it. I've seen a lot of effort put into unguided documentation efforts that put out huge, unapproachable times that helped nobody. Technology prediction for the 2020s (twitter.com) 7 26. This reminds me of all the “semantic web” dreams that never happened. For a few years. Plugin support for a bad idea doesn't make the bad idea better. Is that completely true, though? Why? [1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3633-on-writing-interfaces-we... (2013). I do feel for you :) but at the same time I think Markdown, the tool, is not to blame for this. This place is becoming a meme of itself more and more each and every day. I went to the writing center at my school. Or is it the fact that it's documentation that makes it not worthwhile to comment on? Anything less will result in bugs. https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/#installing-with-ge... https://github.com/executablebooks/sphinx-tabs#grouped-tabs. Hope you enjoy the podcast, there are some gems there about SEO. - warmans. Especially please don’t tell me to ignore an industry standard only to offer some bespoke solution as an alternative. It worked very well. I think it is not chance that XML and Lisp pair so well. These 4 split ideas are great. It is suggested that you read the documentation, which is available on this Github page. One way to achieve this is using Sphinx (documentation generator based on reStructuredText. This can also be important for technical documentation. There should be a roadmap somewhere as well, possibly in a Wiki or the developer docs. Half of working with it is trial-and-error and the other half is hope-and-pray. Any documentation is better than none, so whatever is easiest is the best. I've been trying to get my head around a particular Swagger project. At that time, markup like this will become possible: (I know, I know, instead of complaining I should submit a fucking patch. They all learned through analysis how great author have written this or that way, but they don't know where to start. I've also written a library to route into ktor in a type safe way. So some free form text and then a block with instructions that are different per environment or customer or whatever. Sometimes I go into a tool like Airtable to define content pieces, but there are a lot of pieces. Which also results in each function having its own comment section, where users can post further examples and pitfalls with that function. Reviews and mentions. A cool tool to combine with it is jupytext, so you can keep your notebooks as rmarkdown files, which is a bit more human readable / GitHub editable. Other than that document in comments. Best combined with Antora, Asciidoc's answer to Sphinx. My first problem is that "a server" only tells me it probably listens on a socket. There's not a suggested or standard order, so yes there's some mental overhead in deciding which header styles you want to be which level, but a lot of projects tend to have a "lint" guide for that at this point. Just want to lend weight to your comment. What is it?". I have convinced my colleagues at work to use it as well: https://nimbus.guide/, 1) Tutorials <- starting point Hacker News API serves as a source of real-time news, articles, and comments to the Hacker News website. These tools have been embraced by scientists who want to generate reproducible documents. It works in Trello. What I'm looking for is a way to define a chapter/sub-chapter recipe and work on iterative changes to content even as I refine the recipe definitions. 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