Engineers and tech writers who wants to contribute to WebRTC documentation
Conceptual documentation provides overview of APIs or systems. Examples can be threading model of a particular module or data life cycle. Conceptual documentation can skip some edge cases in favor of clarity. The main point is to impart understanding.
Conceptual documentation often cannot be embedded directly within the source code because it usually describes multiple APIs and entites, so the only logical place to document such complex behavior is through a separate conceptual document.
A concept document needs to be useful to both experts and novices. Moreover, it needs to emphasize clarity, so it often needs to sacrifice completeness and sometimes strict accuracy. That's not to say a conceptual document should intentionally be inaccurate. It just means that is should focus more on common usage and leave rare ones or side effects for class/function level comments.
In the WebRTC repo, conceptual documentation is located in g3doc subfolders of related components. To add a new document for the component Foo find a g3doc subfolder for this component and create a .md file there with desired documentation. If there is no g3doc subfolder, create a new one and add g3doc.lua file there with following content:
config = require('/g3doc/g3doc.lua')
return config
If you are a Googler also please specify an owner, who will be responsible for keeping this documentation updated, by adding the next lines at the beginning of your .md file immediately after page title:
<?\% config.freshness.owner = '<user name>' %?> <?\% config.freshness.reviewed = '<last review date in format yyyy-mm-dd>' %?>
After the document is ready you should add it into /g3doc/sitemap.md, so it will be visible for others.
The documentation is written in g3doc, which is a markup format derived from markdown. This is processed by multiple tools, so we recommend using only simple markup, and previewing the documents in multiple viewers if possible.
Documentation of specific classes and function APIs and their usage, inculding their purpose, is embedded in the .h files defining that API. See C++ style guide for pointers on how to write API documentatin in .h files.