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Re: Phht! on screenscaping

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On 11-09-30 01:04 PM, Roedy Green wrote:
> On my website I have links to 20 different bookstores.  The problem
> is, there is no guarantee all the bookstores actually carry any given
> book.  I wanted to grey-out links to bookstores that don't for now
> carry that particular book.
> 
> This means probing every bookstore with every ISBN to see if they have
> it.  I discovered I needed an average of 8 marker strings to analyse
> the response  There are about 4 different ways they say they have the
> book and 4 to say they do not.  I found this by trial and error,
> adding more and more strings and seeing if there were responses that
> could not be categorised, then translating and examining the responses
> for likely markers, then looking at the original. This was complicated
> somewhat since some of the bookstores are in German, French, Italian
> and Spanish. 
> 
> As the bookstores change their wordings, I will have to keep adjusting
> my program to track.
> 
> All his would be so much easier if the bookstores would offer an
> alternate computer-friendly api.  You could give them an ISBN, and
> they could give you back some XML, JSON, CSV etc, with a single Yes/No
> instock field.  It would take them all of an hour to cook something
> up.  Sometimes they do it, but make it so complicated and so volatile
> you might as well screenscrape.
> 
> Ditto companies that sell posters, or sell anything else via
> affiliates need that sort of API.

An hour? Even if one single bookstore decided to do that with their own
proprietary API, and they owned their own server and had a dedicated
developer on staff, it still wouldn't happen quite that quick. And how
would you the consumer then find out about this API? You don't really
believe in things like UDDI still, right? And assuming you did have some
way of discovering the API you'd still have to adapt your own client
code for it.

Way over an hour.

And _whose_ API is that? Individual bookstore API? Not practical. So
does a chain decide to do that instead? Committees, approvals. Months of
work. Industry-wide consortium, conflicting with existing proprietary
APIs? Years or never.

You're actually better off screenscraping. I definitely don't see how
this would be more work than dealing with thousands of different APIs.

AHS

-- 
I tend to watch a little TV... Court TV, once in a while. Some of the
cases I get interested in.
-- O. J. Simpson

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Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-09-30 09:04 -0700
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping markspace <-@.> - 2011-09-30 10:10 -0700
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-09-30 10:24 -0700
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping markspace <-@.> - 2011-09-30 10:30 -0700
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-09-30 10:40 -0700
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 21:19 -0400
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 21:21 -0400
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-09-30 22:53 -0300
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 22:11 -0400
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-10-01 09:09 -0300
        Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-10-01 15:48 -0400
        Re: Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-10-01 19:22 -0700
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Movable Hype <mhype101@snortwad.net> - 2011-10-02 03:40 +0000
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-10-02 10:20 -0300
            Re: Phht! on screenscaping Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-10-02 08:43 -0700
              Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-10-02 16:22 -0700
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2011-10-02 12:11 +0000
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-10-01 19:03 -0700

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