HN Explorer

Ask HN: How are API developers building beautiful documentation?

10 points by feralmoan ↗ HN
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!

4 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 14.4 ms ] thread
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.