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Ask HN: How are API developers building beautiful documentation?
I'm currently trying to build nice, clean and engaging API documentation for a service I'm working on but have reached a bit of an impasse. As a backend/architect guy I'm looking at things like https://parse.com/docs/rest https://gocardless.com/docs/api_guide and http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone (for example) and they're beautiful!
Is anyone using a tool or CMS to generate these types of API docs (single page w/scrollspy) or are they built in-house with a designers touch?
Would rather be focusing on content over rolling my own, so any help appreciated!
- malandrew 15y agoStripe has great docs, which are hand-edited results from Docco.js. https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api Mashery has iodocs https://github.com/mashery/iodocs https://github.com/mashery/iodocs One thing I particularly like about Backbone's docs is that it has some executable code, which is pretty swank. Similar, but not API docs, but Marijn Haverbeke's book Eloquent Javascript has a built in console that lets you load and test snippets from the book. Cloud9 IDE built with node.js I think also allows embeddable executable snippets in the browser. It'd be cool to see more interactive api docs using similar techniques.
- theallan 15y agoFor Javascript I use JSDoc3 with a custom template which results in documentation such as this: http://datatables.net/docs/DataTables/1.9.0/ http://datatables.net/docs/DataTables/1.9.0/ . Not sure how beautiful one could call it, but I get what I want out of it!
- gauravk92 15y agoIs your template open source?
- swanson 15y agohttps://github.com/jeromegn/DocumentUp https://github.com/jeromegn/DocumentUp https://github.com/github/developer.github.com https://github.com/github/developer.github.com