This morning, I had a rant about the state of blog posting APIs. It's worse than I thought then :)

Have a look at the MetaWebLog "spec" page, for instance - I have no idea what data a server is expected to return, nor do I have any idea what a client should expect to see. I can code a client defensively, but a server? I've been testing on the IRC again, and the tool that was hitting my server couldn't handle some of the data I was sending back. This is just maddening. I mean really - just marvel at this excuse for a spec:

In newPost and editPost, content is not a string, as it is in the Blogger API, it's a struct. The defined members of struct are the elements of <item> in RSS 2.0, providing a rich variety of item-level metadata, with well-understood applications.

The three basic elements are title, link and description. For blogging tools that don't support titles and links, the description element holds what the Blogger API refers to as "content."

For tools that don't support titles and links? I'm supposed to know which ones those are.... how? Can't we find a happy medium between the undefined crap that we have now and the over-defined insanity that is Atom?