docco VS JSDoc

Side note - it's been a while since i've seen a Docco-style annotated-source-style documentation! http://ashkenas.com/docco/

Backbone.js was the first time i saw it, and I loved it! https://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html It demonstrated to me that the libraries I use are just normal code that other people write, and i myself can read it to understand a problem.

jashkenas/docco - Literate Programming can be Quick and Dirty.

Working with new features, frameworks, and tools, the experience of reading documentation is a critical part of it. I have been lucky to work with projects that feature really easy to read documentation such as USWDS and Bun, but I've also had the misfortune to work with pretty terrible documentation like JSDoc. The JSDoc documentation lacks a search field which makes searching for specific items an ordeal and also does not cover many hidden use cases. It provides less than the bare minimum for what it needs to do - a lot of the time I am forced to rely on external user documentation elsewhere to use JSDoc effectively. That was why I was drawn to the search field in particular in Docusaurus.

The Svelte team followed suit but motivated by the maintainer's developer experience as they migrated the project away from TypeScript in favor of plain JSDoc comments for type annotations instead.

Even more relevant, tools like Javadoc, JSDoc, Doxygen, etc. read comments in a specific format to generate documentation. These comments do not affect readability. On the contrary, Javadocs are great for explaining how to use these entities. Combined with tools like my dear Doctest, we even get guarantees of accuracy and correctness!

Document types with JSDoc annotations

📚 JSDoc for documentation and jsdoc-to-markdown to create docs as markdown files

I was already familiar with JSDoc from writing prop descriptions for my previous NPM packages, but I decided to go all in and provide more/better descriptions. I added the following information for the props of both components:

JSDoc can be a powerful tool not only for generating TypeScript types but also for enabling type checking in your JavaScript code. By providing type annotations through JSDoc comments, you can improve code clarity, maintainability, and catch potential errors early on. In this section, we'll explore how to use JSDoc to generate TypeScript types and discuss the benefits of incorporating type checking into your development process.

Use JS Doc and Typescript for full editor annotation and autocomplete.

I use JSDoc annotations, and jsdoc package to auto-generate MarkDown and HTML documentation. I use it for [this website](zuixjs.org/). It's open source.