The Coming Web Revolution

Sure, programmers can write scripts to interact with Web sites without APIs. These scripts impersonate a person using a browser. The approach is called “screen scraping.” But it isn’t a valuable tool for two reasons. Scraping often is disallowed by a site’s terms of use, and breaking rules never feels good. Second, scraping is difficult because it’s brittle. Since it relies on the exact details of the HTML source, scraping code breaks each time the site owner modifies his or her screens.