This is great - the kind of thing product managers and technical documentation writers should definitely know about. Thanks to the authors for providing it and the conference.
Another cool thing about docs written this way is they are very developer friendly but still accessible to non-developer writers - and in some cases/organizations, getting developers to provide documentation can be difficult. Having this be low friction between the two groups (say, non-developers and developers) is really quite nice - both can contribute to internal and external documentation.
I still find some folks trying to do this kind of thing in Word, and find the markup, source control with the document conversion workflow to be many many times more efficient.
Between generating static html for documentation sites, PDFs for embedded/shippable/more "end user friendly" docs and more technical/plain text formats for developers - this workflow has something for every audience/consumer of documentation - at least for written docs.
A lot of the experience from writing this has come from running Read the Docs: https://readthedocs.org/ -- which we've been hosting OSS docs built this way for over 4 years.
We're taking these ideas and building a paid, private version for companies that is just getting going. The goal is to take these ideas, with a product that embodies the philosophy, and try and spread it across private companies: https://readthedocs.com/
Your comment that it is important and valuable is a great validation. I hope that we're successful in being part of the solution to bringing this workflow to the world :)
Another cool thing about docs written this way is they are very developer friendly but still accessible to non-developer writers - and in some cases/organizations, getting developers to provide documentation can be difficult. Having this be low friction between the two groups (say, non-developers and developers) is really quite nice - both can contribute to internal and external documentation.
I still find some folks trying to do this kind of thing in Word, and find the markup, source control with the document conversion workflow to be many many times more efficient.
Between generating static html for documentation sites, PDFs for embedded/shippable/more "end user friendly" docs and more technical/plain text formats for developers - this workflow has something for every audience/consumer of documentation - at least for written docs.