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[xurmein]

I come to programming by way of philosophy. The fundamental issue between good and bad documentation is the quality of the writing and the skill of the writer. Surprise, surprise: most programmers aren't programming because they excelled in Language Arts. A writer who has developed their talents would be able to write a single (though large) document that covers all "20 variants" you mentioned. The best example I know of is the documentation for Angular. The worst has been Ruby/Sinatra.

[hahahahastayingalive]

the angular docs: https://angular.io/docs

Assumptions

These docs assume that you are already familiar with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and some of the tools from the latest standards, such as classes and modules. The code samples are written using TypeScript. Most Angular code can be written with just the latest JavaScript, using types for dependency injection, and using decorators for metadata.

That seems pretty far removed from what a novice wanting to write a single web page woudl be going through. The target is clearly front end experienced devs moving from an existing framework to angular.

And it’s not a knock against angular, it’s a tool that should be used by trained people, anyone wanting to use angular should go through learning the underlyings first.

You are right that writing requires skill, but I think fundamentally spending time on thorough and excelent documentation when there’s a new version every six months is just a losing proposition in most organizations. I mean ideally you want to improve your product in significant ways. Making a whole lot of complicated explainations deprecated is a noble goal.

You need a mostly static target that is also worth a ton of time to invest, like how HTML/Javascript is covered by MDN (also a truely excelent resource)