[dpearson]

> Scraping online content is so simple these days, if a website doesn't offer an API you still have alternatives ;)

Having written code to both leverage a site's (private) API and to scrape that same site (when the private API stopped existing), I would much, much rather use an API. Yes, the scraper works, but the scraper's code is much messier, and JSON keys, for example, provide some documentation in their own right. Looking at the scraper months later, there's a lot more headscratching. Scraping will work, but it also will leave you searching for many little pieces of information that would be exposed by an API but aren't by a static site.

Still, I will agree that scraping is much easier; I've used jsdom (Node.js) extensively, and, for my use cases, it feels like working in a browser (full DOM, scripts, etc.).

[zevyoura]

Another point in favor of APIs is that scrapers are very brittle, and likely to break with changes to content presentation. Also, scrapers have a lot more overhead as you need to both receive and parse the markup data.