The ECMA standard includes some class library documentation, and it was useful to reuse this documentation to bootstrap Mono’s documentation.

However, the ECMA documentation was in a custom XML dialect. This isn’t too different from how other doc systems use docbook XML.

We could have provided an XML->HTML conversion script, as docbook provides, but monodoc has one feature that devhelp doesn’t: editing support.

Had we relied only devhelp, we couldn’t have allowed any editing of the documentation, and it would have been more difficult for external contributors to help with the documentation effort.