Adriaan’s State of the API address

Adriaan Tijsselling: State of the API address: “In the end, though, it still depends on the blog system developers and how far they want to go in supporting and (properly) implementing the Atom API (without resorting to poor hacks).”

I agree with pretty much everything Adriaan says in this post—and especially the part about not “resorting to poor hacks.” Until you’ve tried to write a weblog editing client that works with a bunch of different systems, you have no idea what a pack of spiders are the various implementations.

Adriaan talks about having a weblog editing API “wrapped in a consistent, tightly-specified, well-documented IETF-controlled XML format and internet standard.” Right on to that.

An additional hope of mine is that, at the same, the API doesn’t take a computer scientist to implement. If it’s difficult and complex, both Adriaan and I will handle it, yes. But the thing to remember is that there’s a ton of creativity and interesting ideas in the scripters and hobbyists out there, and they’re not going to tackle stuff that just takes too long to see any results. That’s one of the reasons that XML-RPC and RSS have had success—they’re so easy to get started with. And that’s worth remembering.