project VS documentation-framework

It is now maintained by this club, I think: https://openwebdocs.org

Open Web Docs is a potential model to draw inspiration from regarding funding: https://openwebdocs.org

Presumably, PostgreSQL has leaders who are responsible for steering the ship. If the project is going to succeed long-term, those leaders have to find ways to keep their contributors happy while also creating an organizational structure that leads to good docs.

Sorry if any of my comments came off naive or obtuse when it comes to open source dynamics. But the reality is that you need good docs, and I'm just trying to give an honest assessment from my experience of the conditions that lead to good docs.

Estelle and the other folks working on Open Web Docs are on the receiving end of sponsorship, and she says she personally has a hard time asking for money. Or to reimburse things like a Grammarly subscription. "Will people get upset if the team meets up in person and uses sponsorship to cover air fare (which, to be clear, OWD didn't do)?"

> Elsewhere in this thread is a link to a separate organization called "OpenWebDocs," which appears to be an outside consortium that contributes to MDN.

Yes, that's what Open Web Docs is. It's funded by individual and corporate contributions, through https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/. The money goes to pay writers (currently 2 full time, but we are hiring 2 more) to create and maintain independent open web documentation ("open" in the sense of accessible to everyone, "independent" in the sense that it shouldn't represent any one company's view). Currently our work is pretty much entirely focused on MDN, although that's not necessarily going to be the only thing we ever work on. Our 2021 high-level goals: https://github.com/openwebdocs/project/blob/main/2021-goals.... .

Open Web Docs long term roadmap will be published soon. However, the initial goals are focused on supporting MDN's recent infrastructure transition and contributing to core web technology documentation, browser compatibility data, and JavaScript documentation on MDN Web Docs.

I forget the terminology, but there's a good "grid" breakdown of documentation types (I think this one: https://documentation.divio.com ) that I've simplified a bit for the internal documentation I'm involved with.

* README, HOWTO, INFO, PROJECT, DESIGN, NOTES, FAQ

When I pull down a `git` repo, I read the `README.md` (of course). I make my own `NOTES.md` (eg: `.gitignore`'d) of what commands, environment variables, useful blog posts, search results, whatever. Rarely do I share or encourage sharing of `NOTES.md` wholesale, but it's helpful to be able to pull out a few snippets or re-orient myself when coming back to that software/project.

Then, other documents get prefixed with "HOWTO-Do-Some-Specific-Thing.md", or "INFO-Some-Particular-Component.md".

"PROJECT-...", and "DESIGN-..." are "dangerous" ones in that they can quickly fall out of date, but they can be very useful while they're being actively managed. I guess personally I've started making sure to include dates or "eras" in the title, eg: "PROJECT-[2024-Feb]-Add-Foo-Support.md" or "DESIGN-[2024-02-14]-...". Stuff that's outlived its usefulness can probably be moved to an `ARCHIVE/...` in case you need it later, but keep it out of the way from confusing newcomers 1-3 years from now.

"FAQ-..." almost never comes into play (hopefully) b/c it should mostly get absorbed into "HOWTO-..." or product improvements, and few products seem to rise to the level of needing FREQUENTLY asked questions. Ideally FAQ's would "go away" with work on the product or other documentation, but I've had some success with it as like sales-oriented (and ideally: sales-managed) FAQ / Canned Customer Response learnings.

Putting it all together you get something like:

  * README.md

Resource: Documentation Best Practices - GitBook

I would not suggest people to follow this in 2024 if they are building any system of non-trivial scope and expect it to be adopted by others who are not required to adopt it.

Back in 2017, I compared "code as documentation" to being dropped into on the street of an unfamiliar city, while a good documentation can serve as a map of the city. [1]

Nearly all recent successful efforts for large new systems understand the value of both high-level overviews and detailed examples / onboarding materials to make adoption easier. When solutions to a certain problem are abundant, people do not need to settle for options that do not have great supporting documentation of the four primary kinds. [2]

[1] https://speakerdeck.com/maxvt/i-got-a-lot-of-problems-with-i...

[2] https://documentation.divio.com/

In the whole spectrum of documentation, man pages were designed to cater for a very specific need: information-oriented reference data. Check https://documentation.divio.com/ for a wonderful classification of documentation into four quadrants: reference, explanations, tutorials, and how-to guides. On the other hand, one can write info files for any of the use cases. That does not make info format inherently better or worse than man pages.

During the years, there have been many attempts to bridge the format gap, and convert texts from one representation to another. One of the most ambitious ones was in Tkman, a man viewer built on then Tcl/Tk system. Its really interesting part was the inclusion of rman, or RosettaMan, a converter of text to a somewhat abstract representation that could then be viewed via a GUI.

I personally look for well-crafted man pages as a sign of quality in software and try to provide them in everything I develop. I admit that I don't often find the time or motivation to write non-reference documentation (like tutorials).

I ran into the divio documentation guide recently that seems to have some awesome "how to write docs" docs

https://documentation.divio.com/ is a good overview of the "four types of documentation" paradigm: tutorials, how-to guides, explanations, and reference have to all exist.

One of my major gripes with the JS/TS ecosystem is that "explanations" are sorely lacking. See https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig for the relevant documentation for tsconfig files. Tutorials are on the page, how-to guides abound on the wider internet (like the OP), and the linked TSConfig Reference and JSON Schema (used in code completion in IDEs) are together absolutely massive.

But an explanation is missing! There is no official documentation about how different options interact to say: as I'm walking a file tree as the Typescript compiler, this is how I will interpret a certain file I encounter, what will be outputted, and how that will be interpreted by bundlers and browsers, especially in an ESM world.

https://medium.com/extra-credit-by-guild/tsconfig-json-demys... is in the right direction, but outdated as ESM has become much more popular in the past 3 years, and still organized by option (so it's already somewhat in the "reference" world).

IMO even independent of documentation, the industry's move to ESM is problematic: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/bca2fda868c1e8b2c2caf76af7d... describes many of the issues. But they're certainly exacerbated by good explanation-style documentation that helps people understand how ESM works under the hood!

I really like the system detailed here: https://documentation.divio.com/. That's targeted more towards externally visible docs, but IMO adapts pretty well as for internal resources too.