[ken]

> The Macintosh model, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. The system doesn’t deal with character streams. Data files are extremely high level, usually assuming that they are specific to an application. When was the last time you piped the output of one program to another on a Mac?

And yet, at least it's possible to have more than one Macintosh application use the same data. Half the world has migrated to web apps, which are far worse. As a user, it's virtually impossible to connect two web apps at all, or access your data in any way except what the designers decided you should be able to do. Data doesn't get any more "specific to an application" than with web apps.

[junke]

Command-line tools where you glue byte streams are, in spirit, very much like web scraping. Sure, tools can be good or bad, but by design you are going to have ad-hoc input/output formats, and for some tools this is interleaved with presentation/visual stuff (colors, alignment, headers, whitespaces, etc.).

In a way web apps are then more alike standard unix stuff, where you parse whatever output you get, hoping that it has enough usable structure to do an acceptable job.

The most reusable web apps are those that offer an API, with JSON/XML data formats where you can easily automate your work, and connect them together.

[jandrese]

> The most reusable web apps are those that offer an API, with JSON/XML data formats where you can easily automate your work, and connect them together.

Sadly these kind are also the most rare.