Who wants DW APIs?

[liv]

Just a quick signal boost, since I'm in the middle of several dozen things: I know several of you have toys or utilities that interact with Dreamwidth. darael is proposing writing some proper APIs to make it non-awful interacting with DW other than by directly loading HTML pages. Please do go and join in the discussion if you think you might ever use such tools.

For historical interest, this discussion seems to have arisen out of the now shelved proposal to make DW work with Usenet-style News (NNTP) readers. I know some of you were keen on that idea, either here or on LJ, so if you have opinions about what would give newsgroup style functionality without actually going all the way to running an NNTP server, your input would be particularly welcome.

If this is gobbledygook to you, you're probably not the target audience so please feel free to ignore this post.

Comments

[sunflowerinrain]

Sorry no bright ideas for implementation, but I like the idea of NNTP-style.

[falena]

If this is gobbledygook to you, you're probably not the target audience so please feel free to ignore this post

This is very true in my case, I just wanted to comment because the way you worded it made me smile. 'Gobbledygook' is such a great word. :)

[ewx]

(I'll try to write a proper comment there at some point; this is a tangent and doesn't need to clutter up a discussion that is actually intended to get something done. l-)

I already have a thing that connects LJ or DW to NNTP. It's unidirectional (it just posts LJ or DW articles to a newsgroup) and doesn't even try to do comments, but even with such limited functionality it highlights what the actually tricky bit is: DW/LJ articles are HTML, while NNTP articles are text, and the moment an article actually takes advantage of any HTML features (e.g. hyperlinks, embedded images, videos, polls) the user experience on the NNTP side starts to get quite sad.

Of course some people's journals are essentially just text; but a "DW-but-only-text-postings to NNTP" gateway is only useful in inverse proportion to how much you want to read non-text postings.

And some newsreaders support HTML, but a "DW to NNTP if you use the right newsreader" is also quite limited (people seem to be incredibly conservative about choice of newsreader).

[lovingboth]

Argh, two versions of this lost (thank you phone...)

When I was looking at doing a cix-style offline reader (to enable extended conversations) the API call that I wanted was 'give me all the posts and comments in journal x since time t'.

[flippac]

I'm a bit worn out to go directly, might later and am happy for this to be linked. Don't want NNTP, would like the outcome of a good API namely the possibility and hopefully actuality of at least one good client for each of iOS and Android.