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HTML is not an interface! (Score:2)
I know you're playing Devil's Advocate here, but when someone puts up a web page with data in it, they don't promise that the interface will never change. In fact they usually change it quite often, as you have to keep web designers busy ;--( OTOH if they setup a SOAP server you might have a better chance at the interface being more stable, or at least at your script complaining about a change, instead of breaking silently. Upgrading should be easier too.
Not that I like SOAP myself, mind you...
mirod
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Re:HTML is not an interface! (Score:2)
Re:HTML is not an interface! (Score:2)
I'm not so sure Matt is playing devil's advocate. I think he's got his pragmatist hat placed squarely upon his head.
It would be nice from an ideological point of view if this information were in a constant format (XML-RPC, SOAP, plain XML or even a reasonably static XHTML layout). Realistically, that's not going to happen on a large scale any time
Re:HTML is not an interface! (Score:2)
Hmmmm, this whole thing is starting to make me wonder if it's not time that I should grab my old XML+CSS bat out of the cupboard and start practising a few swings... wouldn't it indeed be cool if REST style services were both human and computer readable?
Who knows, maybe this time around it won't be just Simon St. Laurent and/or me vs. xml-dev...
-- Robin Berjon [berjon.com]