Ask HN: What makes a great API documentation in your opinion?

There are a lot of different ways to do documentation.

There are the basics like having good SDK/libraries references. For example, [Stripe's famous 3 panels view](https://stripe.com/docs/api) is one of many ways of displaying that information.

It does get quickly blurry when you introduce topics like:

- Explaining the main concepts of the products/API

- Quick Start Guides (multiple languages?)

- How-tos for the main use cases

- Tutorials such as how to do with . Do you even include that in the docs?

Then there are the features of docs:

- Button to try this function/API call

- Includes the user' API keys in the sample code if they are logged in

- all of the content in one very long page or split it up.

- etc

So HN, what do you like to see in an API documentation? from little features, cosmetics, layout or how to structure the content. I want to hear about it!

I like reference APIs mixed with examples. MSDN is great when it does this and pretty horrible when they don't. There's nothing worse than a highly composed API (think Android) without examples.