// the find
mojombo/tomdoc
A flexible code documentation specification with human readers in mind.
TomDoc is a documentation specification for writing comments that are readable as plain text but structured enough to be parsed into API docs. It targets library authors who want documentation conventions without committing to a specific tool's syntax up front.
The spec is genuinely tool-agnostic — it defines a convention, not a parser or generator, so it can be adopted incrementally without a build dependency. Tom Preston-Werner's authorship gave it real traction in the Ruby community around 2011-2012, particularly for gem documentation.
Last push was 2012 — this is a dead spec, not a maintained project, and the README itself just points elsewhere (tomdoc.org) rather than containing the actual content. There's no reference implementation in this repo, no tooling, and no indication the spec evolved past whatever version it was frozen at; anyone adopting it today is choosing an abandoned convention over YARD, JSDoc, or rustdoc equivalents that are actively maintained.