
Ask HN: How are API developers building beautiful documentation? - feralmoan
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!<p>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?<p>Would rather be focusing on content over rolling my own, so any help appreciated!
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malandrew
Stripe has great docs, which are hand-edited results from Docco.js.
<https://stripe.com/docs/api>

Mashery has 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.

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theallan
For Javascript I use JSDoc3 with a custom template which results in
documentation such as this: <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!

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gauravk92
Is your template open source?

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swanson
<https://github.com/jeromegn/DocumentUp>

<https://github.com/github/developer.github.com>

