[koreth1]

I kind of hate the fact that the term "API" has lost its generality in the minds of a huge number of practitioners, and people now assume it refers to a set of network (usually HTTP) request and response formats.

It's great that we have a succinct word to describe programmatic interfaces built on top of HTTP. It's not great that there's no longer a universally-understood word for the original more general meaning even though, as this thread demonstrates, the original meaning is still as relevant as ever.

[compootr]

I think context has to be taken into account

people here are referring to some financial service on the internet, whose API is invoked over http

An article about some library might be viewed differently, i.e "X's API is better than Z's"...etc