I am currently writing a plugin for jQuery.
Now I wonder how I should create the documentation for this plugin as I guess that there are better ways than directly writing HTML.
However, I do not want to put my documentation into the sourcecode and thereby making finding the correct lines while debugging impossible. Thus, I am looking for a way to separate documentation and sourcecode.
How is the jQuery documentation generated? When looking into the jQuery sourcecode, I don’t find any documentation annotations which makes me hope that I might be able to use the same system as they do.
Are the tools they use somehow documented?
I found the following XML-file while looking for an answer http://api.jquery.com/api/ which seems to be generated sometime inside the “build”-process of jQuery.
I would be happy to write my documentation into a similar file and run some tools over it to “prettify” it for displaying it to the user.
How do you create your documentation for jQuery libaries (except putting it into the sourcecode)?
Does anyone know the tools the jQuery team uses (or at least in which format the documentation originally is)?
Many thanks in advance!
It looks like NaturalDocs provides for documentation in external files (as well as in the source code).
The tool that the Prototype team use for documenting Prototype, PDoc, works purely from comments. (The link died, so I removed it.) So you could have .js files that were purely the PDoc comments for your plug-in.2015: As far as I can tell, PDoc is dead.I’d advocate having the comments in the source code — classic maintenance issue having them separated — but if you’re set on not doing that, fair ’nuff, both of those seem to be options for you.