Hmm, never really thought of RSS as a “Poor Man’s API”, but I guess in the case of these XML parsers, I guess it could be seen that way.

Roland Tanglao first pointed this out, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of months: Babak Nivi says that RSS is an API for content:

RSS is like an API for content. RSS gives you access to a web site’s data just like an API gives you access to a web site’s computing power. Most important, RSS gives you access to your data that you have locked up on a web site.
RSS is an API for Content

Emphasis in original. Note that he says “like an API” in the text of the article but omits the “like” in the title. The “like” is more appropriate, since RSS normally doesn’t give you access to a site’s past data, nor should it: it shines best when giving you the most recent content—usually writing, but also photos and video and music—from a site. That’s an important distinction from an API, which usually gives programmers access to a site’s old data based on a certain set of parameters. You can put parameters in RSS feeds—”give me the most recent photos tagged with ‘beautiful’” or “give me the most recent mentions of my full name”—but RSS is generally not as flexible as APIs (”give me all photos between certain times”, “give me all mentions of my family name cross-indexed with the tag ‘icelandic’”. [Read the rest]