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About 15 years ago, I worked on an add-on for a large online service, using their official, versioned, documented API. We had to build a test suite just to verify that the API working as expected, because they would break it so often, and also the documentation didn't always match reality. This was a paid API we used on a pay-per-use basis, IIRC, and had official support for. In the beginning, we had a false sense of security about the version numbers and such. The first couple of breaks seemed to be "just this one time". Then we realized that it was happening all the time, and so the test suite. (I was a junior, so I can't take credit for this work, just a witness.) API is often no more reliable than scraping human UI most of the time, with the added disadvantage of being second-level importance. Personally, I've tried to combine human UI with API as much as possible. For example, I added a feature for being able to post via direct URL entry, like so: http://example.com/hello+world most browsers will convert the spaces for you too, so you can just type your text into the address bar. |