Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> More to the point, there's masses of tricky parsing to wade through 
>> all the presentational HTML to extract the actual raw data I'm after.
> 
> That's because you're getting the results in HTML instead of "via an API".
> 
> That's what people are talking about when they talk about web APIs: 
> presenting data without making you parse it.
> 
> "REST" is a pattern for doing this in a way that *also* lets you use a 
> web browser to reverse-engineer the protocols by looking at it and which 
> is theoretically kind to intermediate proxies.
> 
> "SOAP" is a pattern for doing this in a way that lets you publish the 
> specification of the interface in a form that a tool can generate code 
> to decode it into whatever native data structures are available for your 
> language.

So you mean you get the web server to search an XML document so the 
client at the other end can parse it into something useful more easily?

> What you're doing is called "screen scraping", and yes, it breaks when 
> the format of the web page changes, which happens often when there's so 
> many people doing screen scraping that it starts to impact the actual 
> customers of the web site.

I doubt my one hit per month hurts PassMark. ;-)

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