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.

I'd like to take advantage of the attention it's getting to point out that I am working on translating Diátaxis into other languages https://diataxis.fr/translation/, and you can see an in-progress version with some partially completed translations at https://diataxis-translated.readthedocs.io/translation/.

I urge people to not read this. Once you do, you will see all documentation will as the flawed and confusing mess it is. Ignorance is bliss!

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.

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.

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.

Posted many times. Here's the most recent time from 2024 (also has most discussion).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42325011

I also admire what there isn't: certs, training, manifesto, "yah ain't holding it rite" blog posts, and job ads for a "Diátaxis Master".

Perhaps add "A systematic approach to technical documentation authoring" to the title?

How is this different from Divio's documentation system?: https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/

Update: https://diataxis.fr/colophon/#origins-and-development (Divio came first).

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.

Diataxis + ADRs + C4 = The holy trinity of docs

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.

[0] https://passo.uno/seven-action-model/