Extending official documentation to include addons

[bluelhf]

Currently, the Skript documentation ecosystem is split into three kinds of services:

• The official documentation, which provides syntaxes and information exclusively for Skript
• The (quasi-official) skUnity Docs, which provides syntaxes for addons also, but is closed-source and maintained solely by @BaeFell
• Unofficial documentation (SkriptHub by @eyesniper2, SkDocs by @CrebsTheCoder, skript-api by @miberss) which aim to provide better documentation and UX and skUnity Docs. They are generally successful and provide a great user experience, but they have the burden of maintaining compatibility with Skript (either via their own syntax JSON generator or using Skript's implementation). Notably, of these only skript-api is open-source.

In Skript itself we see a similar situation, but instead of competing documentation platforms there are competing implementations of syntaxes. For example, SkBee and Lusk have both historically implemented features that reasonably should be in vanilla Skript (bell syntaxes and Adventure components to name two). The benefit of Skript and addons being free and open-source is that addon maintainers can provide battle-tested code directly to Skript and Skript maintainers can reference addons' implementations to gain insight into how these features should be implemented and what syntax users are likely to be familiar with. It's often the case that developers also contribute to Skript directly rather than building an add-on, which is great.

This is currently not the case for documentation; because skUnity is closed-source, people with skills and interest in developing the documentation platform can only influence it by reporting issues directly to BaeFell. The official Skript documentation is open-source, but the lack of addon support means it cannot act as a comprehensive source. People develop their own solutions for documentation, but services differ architecturally and code usually can't be easily transferred from one documentation platform to another.

Skript would benefit from a semi-official centralised source for addon documentation that is open-source and accepts contributions from the community; people currently maintaining their own documentation could contribute their experience and knowledge.