I never saw the point in Diataxis, but honestly while vibe coding it's pretty convenient to tell an LLM "do diataxis" and get decent first pass documentation out of it.
I and my team did a full set of documentation for handing over a codebase to the client. A large complex codebase with accumulated history and subtle reasons why things were done.
Diataxis was fantastic. It took a bit of effort to work out what the page titles were to cover everything we needed, but then when you were writing a page it was glorious.
It was so clear what you were saying and what "voice" you were writing in. If it's a Reference page you're all descriptive, with diagrams and bullet points. When it's a guide you're more discursive, but you know you're just imparting information not trying to teach. It made it so much easier to be coherent and clear about everything.
We just invested a good amount of time restructuring our docs for Diátaxis. It was helpful, but I wouldn't take it as gospel. The important thing to remember is that each piece of content should be one of the four types.
If you're embarking upon a refactoring / rewriting journey for your docs, the only advice I'd share is to actually read the website beginning to end before starting. Especially this page: https://diataxis.fr/complex-hierarchies/. The guide is (unsurprisingly) very well written, and it's easy to internalize the concepts because they're repeated often.
Another documentation model: Fabrizio's seven actions [0]. People read docs to appraise, understand, explore, practice, remember, develop, and troubleshoot, usually in that order.
It feels so natural and obvious compared to Diataxis' forced abstractions, where I'm still left wondering "what's the difference between a tutorial and a how-to guide?"
But! I'm glad for anything that helps people organize and maintain docs.
I love seeing this pop up again. Our customer support team has been steadily moving all of our docs over to Diátaxis for a while and it's been a really nice improvement.
I love whenever this comes up. It’s a great framework for thinking about and writing docs.
It’s hard to keep documentation up to date, however, and I find that items like tutorials and reference materials (unless generated off versioned code) can drift pretty far over time.
A feature I like in concept that notion introduced with wikis ages ago was a “verification” timestamp, where you specify a timeframe after which the doc owner has to reconfirm that the doc is up to date. A bit too easy to rubber stamp, unfortunately, but maybe if it took the doc offline entirely without a more robust audit.
I am sure that this exists for other ecosystems as well - rustdoc, Documenter.jl and Sphinx seem to support this - but my experience lies in R: three of the Diátaxis categories map quite nicely onto R package constructs:
- Tutorials are implemented as "vignettes", executed on package validation
- How-Tos are attached in roxygen documentation chunks, likewise executable by default - execution disabled when expensive or to avoid side effects.
- Reference is implemented in a TeX or Markdown format, commonly parsed by roxygen
The only thing that's missing is a canonical way of documenting implementation rationale. Having the documentation outside the repo worked before LLMs, but there was always that weak point of code drifting away from the documentation...
Something that Python gets right is that their entire docs site is versioned - select 2.7.18, for example, and you get the 2.7 docs right down to the tutorial. The Python development process is also very careful about keeping documentation up to date; the PEP process even requires an explicit "How to Teach This" section for proposals that add or change language features.
I’ve been loving Diataxis! My agents follow guidance that links from other file types to a reference file type must be one way. Stays DRY. Also to regularly cut long reference files into smaller focused ones and link from the main.
Please do not make me click on "reference" to get to "API docs". I love diataxis, but dear lord, do not make me click an extra time to get to the thing I actually need 95% of the time.
Overall, the movement is good, except for how it tends to turn 1-click docs into 2-click docs (or more for folks who don't know that API docs probably live under reference.)
You are allowed to have a top level tab/link to API docs. Please do not hide those from me while you "improve" your docs.
I don't have a problem with Diataxis itself but every time it comes up it saddens me because it is a reminder of how bad the technical writing community (by which, here I mean people who have technical writer as a job title) has been about popularizing and sharing their institutional knowledge, to the point that diataxis is far more popular and what a lot of people in tech think about when they think about technical writing.
The concept of 4 different uses of documentation seems great. But I wonder why the presentation of Diaraxis itself is not clearly structured into these 4 different "views" on documentation? Or are they?
1. In general, do whatever Wikipedia does. e.g., start with a one-sentence definition, then a couple paragraphs of summary, then go into short specified sections, and keep links to the "Citations" at the end. It's been refined for 25 years, it's older than most of your engineers, it's 50+% correct by default.
2. Keep every section to one screenful. If your reader can't see a headline, they get lost.
3. Put a funny picture at the top of the page. Or at least something off Wikimedia Commons.
4. Don't spend a lot of time writing anything. And don't use AI. The AI doesn't know what's inside your head. You yourself have an inkling. The longer you write, the further you'll get. Just write one short thing at a time and refactor aggressively later. Never throw shit over a fence blind. Nobody reads shit that's been flung over a fence.
Steven King said writing is telepathy. All mediated communication sits on a Pareto trade-off with face-to-face communication. Media is always less interactive with slower iterations. You need to figure out exactly what your audience needs, right when they're reading, and write just that, knock 'em dead, and leave. Don't add detail. They'll ask if they need detail.
I was not familiar with Diataxis, and as I was reading through the webpage, I kept wondering if there were any concrete examples. I love cooking, and it was interesting to see that some of the insights of the whole philosophy used teaching how to cook as an example.
I read a lot of cookbooks, and interestingly enough, I never stopped thinking about what makes a good cookbook (except for its recipes). Diataxis answers that in a way. Indeed, the best cookbooks I have read in some way or another followed Diataxis.
I can't help but notice that for a documentation organization framework/method it failed to produce its own good documentation.
There are repetitive bloated texts with unnecessary distractions and unenlightening illustrations. It is maybe well-organized, if one can speak about good organization of poorly expressed knowledge at all.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 42.0 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42325011
Diataxis was fantastic. It took a bit of effort to work out what the page titles were to cover everything we needed, but then when you were writing a page it was glorious.
It was so clear what you were saying and what "voice" you were writing in. If it's a Reference page you're all descriptive, with diagrams and bullet points. When it's a guide you're more discursive, but you know you're just imparting information not trying to teach. It made it so much easier to be coherent and clear about everything.
Update: https://diataxis.fr/colophon/#origins-and-development (Divio came first).
If you're embarking upon a refactoring / rewriting journey for your docs, the only advice I'd share is to actually read the website beginning to end before starting. Especially this page: https://diataxis.fr/complex-hierarchies/. The guide is (unsurprisingly) very well written, and it's easy to internalize the concepts because they're repeated often.
Huh. The “Start here” page says exactly the opposite. It's literally the first two sentences on the page:
> You don’t need to read everything on this website to make sense of Diátaxis, or to start using it in practice. In fact I recommend that you don’t.
So what makes you recommend reading it all first?
It feels so natural and obvious compared to Diataxis' forced abstractions, where I'm still left wondering "what's the difference between a tutorial and a how-to guide?"
But! I'm glad for anything that helps people organize and maintain docs.
[0] https://passo.uno/seven-action-model/
It’s hard to keep documentation up to date, however, and I find that items like tutorials and reference materials (unless generated off versioned code) can drift pretty far over time.
A feature I like in concept that notion introduced with wikis ages ago was a “verification” timestamp, where you specify a timeframe after which the doc owner has to reconfirm that the doc is up to date. A bit too easy to rubber stamp, unfortunately, but maybe if it took the doc offline entirely without a more robust audit.
- Tutorials are implemented as "vignettes", executed on package validation - How-Tos are attached in roxygen documentation chunks, likewise executable by default - execution disabled when expensive or to avoid side effects. - Reference is implemented in a TeX or Markdown format, commonly parsed by roxygen
The only thing that's missing is a canonical way of documenting implementation rationale. Having the documentation outside the repo worked before LLMs, but there was always that weak point of code drifting away from the documentation...
Overall, the movement is good, except for how it tends to turn 1-click docs into 2-click docs (or more for folks who don't know that API docs probably live under reference.)
You are allowed to have a top level tab/link to API docs. Please do not hide those from me while you "improve" your docs.
1. In general, do whatever Wikipedia does. e.g., start with a one-sentence definition, then a couple paragraphs of summary, then go into short specified sections, and keep links to the "Citations" at the end. It's been refined for 25 years, it's older than most of your engineers, it's 50+% correct by default.
2. Keep every section to one screenful. If your reader can't see a headline, they get lost.
3. Put a funny picture at the top of the page. Or at least something off Wikimedia Commons.
4. Don't spend a lot of time writing anything. And don't use AI. The AI doesn't know what's inside your head. You yourself have an inkling. The longer you write, the further you'll get. Just write one short thing at a time and refactor aggressively later. Never throw shit over a fence blind. Nobody reads shit that's been flung over a fence.
Steven King said writing is telepathy. All mediated communication sits on a Pareto trade-off with face-to-face communication. Media is always less interactive with slower iterations. You need to figure out exactly what your audience needs, right when they're reading, and write just that, knock 'em dead, and leave. Don't add detail. They'll ask if they need detail.
I read a lot of cookbooks, and interestingly enough, I never stopped thinking about what makes a good cookbook (except for its recipes). Diataxis answers that in a way. Indeed, the best cookbooks I have read in some way or another followed Diataxis.
Parataxis: arranging alongside
Diátaxis: arranging across
Just released, alpha quality, need feedback/fine-tuning. Testing it now on my OSS repos.
There are repetitive bloated texts with unnecessary distractions and unenlightening illustrations. It is maybe well-organized, if one can speak about good organization of poorly expressed knowledge at all.