

The Long-Term Failure of Web APIs - nbradbury
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2011/11/the-long-term-failure-of-web-apis.html

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dotBen
You could look at it the other way...

Yes, those Web APIs broke things when they were deprecated and then removed -
but in many cases they allowed progress and innovation to occur swiftly within
the vendor that offered them.

Conversely, while it's true Homesite still runs on the latest version of
Windows today, that fact it has that backwards compatibility is the root cause
of a lot why many have found Windows today to be old-hat and lacking
innovation in many places.

Apple made the difficult decision with OS X to break computability with OS 9
in order to build a better OS - which is akin to breaking their APIs.

We also live in an era of web-based software, which by its nature shouldn't be
as affected by changes in web-based APIs given it's centralized nature. Sure
we still need desktop software in places, and desktop software can consume
web-APIs - but the original premise Nick makes is in-part caused by the
difficulties with ensure users keep their desktop-software up to date.

 _(I was a big fan of Homesite - we built a lot of the BBC News Website
template HTML in Homesite)_

