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NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • A web site is an API. :-) And newsfeeds are a widely supported subset of that.

    If you think otherwise, you’re thinking in terms of implementation, not in terms of interface. The web’s architectural goal is to make it not matter whether the document you receive is served from a static file, generated dynamically from an SQL database, served statically from a store other than the filesystem, or… whatever else. In the end there’s just documents with links you can follow, and that’s

    • Except that a documented API at least implies that if it's not static, the designers will at least try to minimize changes (that is, if the designers are are aware of the issues involved). A Web site makes no such claims, in general. If they had something on their site which said "go ahead and scrape us, baby, it won't hurt!", then I'd be less worried. They don't say that, so the scraping route is, er, fragile at best.