[kw-pm] xml

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

> ...So you mean that communicating application-to-application over the web
> is made easier by wrapping things up in another layer of encapsulation
> than by parsing the webpage output and submitting standard forms?

Oh dear lord yes.

Screen-scraping is best-effort only.  If you want any kind of reliability 
whatsoever you MUST standardize and NOT give the people who make the pages 
purdy the ability to muck with it.  That is precisely why you get wonderful 
things like XML -- you can pass the data to the page purdyfier with 
something like fop and let the artists do their thing, but still get the 
data in a reliable format by picking it off just before the artist.  

Or, do it right in the first place and offer XMLRPC or SOAP interfaces.

Regards,
Andrew