[andkon]

I think you're right that the services themselves break, but more often than not, the failure mode is that what page you're monitoring changes its structure, and then every refresh gives you data that is incommensurate with what came before. It's why we version APIs, but there's no such versioning we expose on websites.

I think that also points to why what you propose would be very hard to do: in HTML pages, even if the page structure (a new div level) changes, it's hard to say if that's actually a fundamental change to how they've architected the information hierarchy you're trying to get notified out, or if that is indeed the information itself. It's ambiguous.

Maybe that's okay? Like, if all you want is a notification about every time a thing changes, regardless of the meaning of the change, then what you're describing is possible. But I think the meaning of the change is important, and that's ultimately what shifts over time in ways computers cannot grok.

[biggunz]

"But I think the meaning of the change is important" this is exactly right, is it a whitespace? is it the text? what is "change" ?