Edit: Thank you for all of your answers. I feel I have a much better understanding of what’s going on. Hope to see y’all on the other side of this.
In: 241
You use your browser to access websites and to make actions on it. As an human this is fine, even if the page (styles or data) keep changing, you can figure everything out. A computer can’t without somebody else updating it again and again.
With nowday internet, a website can change a lot in a small maner of time. Important events, just because branding is important, laws, or even some other silly thing like ads that may change the user experience with more invasive experience from time to time.
An API is a backdoor to allow softwares to do the same thing in a way that barely change (and without ads, popup, …)
Sometime API are used to automate stuffs (like those bot you can see here and there on reddit).
Sometime, peoples are making tools to “extend” the original service.
Like, let said reddit is used by influent peoples, maybe you don’t want them to post without someone from the public relation department taking a look at it. So I may create a website where the influent people would post. Then a public relation guy would approve it and I would submit the post to reddit via the API.
(May not be the best user experience here since you shouldn’t post using the official mean and my “app” only handle posting and don’t let you browse reddit)
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