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The Future of (API) Documentation

The immediate future for software is that the source code has to be able to describe itself. The code comments need to be in a standard format that can easily be extracted with the syntax into online reference systems. This is paramount for both open-source and proprietary code if software companies want any longevity and reusability out of their code.

Whereas I believe that XML will (initially) provide only marginal added-value to run-of-the-mill documentation, this is not true when it comes to API documentation. (a) If the source code contains comment that can be extracted, (b) if those comments can contain HTML syntax (as is the case with open-source Doxygen comments), and (c) if the need remains for the source code to describe itself, then XML tags within the code comments is a natural extension.

If the source code itself is well commented and marked up appropriately with descriptive XML tags, the hooks are then in place for having the source code for software solutions served up from data bases.



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Open-Source tools compliments of Voyant Technologies, Inc. and Glenn C. Maxey.
01/13/2003

TP Tools v2-00-0a

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