Simon Willison’s Weblog

Making world-class docs takes effort (via) Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg writes about his principles for good documentation. I agree with all of these: he emphasizes keeping docs in the repo, avoiding the temptation to exclusively generate them from code, featuring examples and ensuring every API you provide has documentation. Daniel describes an approach similar to the documentation unit tests I’ve been using for my own projects: he has scripts which scan the curl documentation to ensure not only that everything is documented but that each documentation area contains the same sections in the same order.