This paper is an overview of the EWIDL documentation management system for Web APIs. We designed EWIDL based on our experience with the development of Tizen Web API. Over the eight years of our work, two requirements have proven to be the most important for successful documentation management. Firstly, the documentation should be machine-readable to support automatic validation tools development. EWIDL achieves this by combining Doxygen documentation comments' format with Web IDL language. Secondly, the system should support the maintenance of multiple variants of documentation. Tizen Web API behavior varies between different target devices, depending on the software version and hardware profile (mobile, wearable, and TV). Managing documentation for all configurations simultaneously is a challenging task with ever-increasing complexity as new versions are released. We chose a single-sourcing approach by including conditional configuration preprocessor syntax in EWIDL documents.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9240696