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Robert Ullmann wrote:
If you
screen-scrape an HTML *user interface form* for your bot, YOU
WILL GET BROKEN BY CHANGES, especially if you don't bother to even TRY
to behave like an actual client (which would load all the required form
variables from the edit page in the first place).
Look, I understand your frustration, but there wasn't an API for
people to use. So lots of stuff (LOTS) was built on the GUI.
...and every time the forms change in a trivial way that every compliant
client would survive just by submitting back the form fields it's given,
people who wrote their bots with bad assumptions complain.
(And anyone who used query.php got burned in August;
took a bit of
time for some of those things to get fixed.)
Yeah, people only had a year or so to update their software to the new API!
People wrote code to submit forms with the parameters
that were
required; they didn't parse the whole effing HTML page.
This is why they break -- bad assumptions in the client code.
- -- brion
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