Where did the style came from?

The documentation style guide was created to make our documentation more consistent and also to apply best practices to the documentation as well. The standard has just been started and will expand over time based on the suggestions made on the Maven dev mailing list. It is a community consensus of how we should write our documentation.

Each rule in this guide should come with a motivation as to why it exists. References to external sources are encouraged.

Date format

How people format a date varies around the world, sometimes making it hard for people to understand each other. The solution to this problem comes in the form of the ISO-8601 standard.

A date in our documentation must follow this standard:

YYYY-MM-DD

where YYYY is the year in the Gregorian calendar, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 31.

Note: All documentation meta-data should respect this convention, for instance for this given APT document:

 ------
 Guide To Maven Documentation Style
 ------
 Dennis Lundberg
 ------
 2008-07-03
 ------

POM Snippet

A POM file must use 2 spaces for each indentation. Because POM snippets are often used in documentation to show the user how to configure something, it is important that these snippets aren't too wide. If the are too wide it will make the page difficult to read on a smaller screen.

When you use a snippet of XML from the POM as an example in your documentation, you need to make sure that the example is properly indented. A user should be able to copy and paste the example into their own POM without the need to change the indentation afterwards.

Also, you should declare all parent POM elements to improve the comprehension. You could use ellipsis (i.e. ...) if you don't want to specify elements.

<project>
  ...
  <distributionManagement>
    <site>
      <id>apache.website</id>
      <url>scp://people.apache.org/www/maven.apache.org/</url>
    </site>
  </distributionManagement>
  ...
</project>

Naming Documentation Files

All file names should replace space by a minus (-), for instance for this given APT document:

 guide-documentation-style.apt

Updating Documentation Files

A good practice is to update the date (with the correct date format) when you are updating documentation files.

Write Thinking

Here are some pointers about English rules when typing material:

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style, specifically Punctuation Part
• Linguistic Style Guidelines, specifically the "Grammatical Guidelines" chapter.