Is Having A PDF for Your API Docs a Sin?
I look at a lot of APIs. I can tell a lot about a company and the people behind an API from looking at their developer portal, documentation, and other building blocks of their presence. One of the more egregious sins I feel an API provider can make when operating their API is publishing their API documentation as a PDF. This is something that was acceptable up until about 2006, but over a decade after it shows that the organization behind an API hasn’t done their homework.
The crime really isn’t the fact that an API provider is using a PDF for their documentation. I’m fine with API providers publishing a PDF version of their API, to provide a portable version of it. Where a PDF version of the documentation becomes a problem is when it is the primary version of the documentation, which demonstrates that the creators don’t get out much and haven’t used many other APIs. If an API team has done their homework and actually put other 3rd party APIs to work, they would know that PDF documentation for APIs is not the norm out in the real world. https://goo.gl/Jgp4SK