Well, JavaDoc is a mix of HTML and custom tag language based, whereas Kotlin moved to Markdown + some similar tags. Because HTML is a pain in the rear to write compared to Markdown and can't express everything you want concisely.

Maybe you mean Rust's documentation is rendered to HTML. In which case, sure, but so what? Good docs can be rendered to non-HTML formats too, typically for IDEs to display quickly without needing to load a full browser.

With Go, the ability to instantly read docs for anything (even just pulling docs for a single function) in terminal is extremely helpful and far superior to a HTML-only approach. "go doc net/http.Client" pulls up the docs for the http client type.

It's one of the features I miss most as I code Rust, and the lack is very detrimental to the coding experience, as pulling up a browser is a massive context switch.

it's a mere scripting language, but I love the similar way powershell does this also, get-help [some-command] -examples

> Can you name a better format for programming language documentation that's also ubiquitously supported?

Info format. It's supported by Emacs, and Emacs is the most ubiquitous of IDE's.

> Emacs is the most ubiquitous of IDE's.

Sorry, have you been in a coma for 30 years?

Your question is rhetorical here, right?

> Info format.

I said "ubiquitously supported". There are several orders of magnitude difference between info format support and HTML support.

> Emacs is the most ubiquitous of IDE's

That's laughably wrong.

Well, it may be on everyone's machine (just type 'which emacs') but that hardly makes it the most commonly used IDE, which I think is what's hard to stomach.