My point is that once you mandate that, then forever all stores must be architected around providing this web API, based on technology assumptions frozen in law.

Building a P2P or distributed store, not based on a central website, just as an example, would be illegal.

This is just one example of how the future would be encumbered forever based on a 90’s software architecture becoming enshrined in law.

The web as it is today is not some endpoint in software evolution.

A Government mandated API is literally the government regulating software architecture.

A law would be horribly broken if it said something like "all stores must have a web API". Alternatives of "web stores must have a web API" or "all businesses with a digital UI must have a published API offering the same features" wouldn't succumb to that.

That's why I take issue with the word "architecture". If a business has chosen to offer a web storefront, a web API can be supplied right alongside that. There's no need for any "architecture" mandate - the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.

Also a P2P/distributed store would itself be defined by an open API, making the issue moot.

> A law would be horribly broken if it said something like "all stores must have a web API". Alternatives of "web stores must have a web API" or "all businesses with a digital UI must have a published API offering the same features" wouldn't succumb to that.

There would have to be a lot more than that. Who would govern API quality, what about service levels, how about authentication and sign up? Data formats, etc. Would these all be up to the vendor? What happens when there is a bug in the API?

> That's why I take issue with the word "architecture". If a business has chosen to offer a web storefront, a web API can be supplied right alongside that.

No, see above. It just isn’t that simple.

> There's no need for any "architecture" mandate - the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.

Well this isn’t what you said before.

> Also a P2P/distributed store would itself be defined by an open API, making the issue moot.

Not at all. There is no reason at all for distributed store network would need to have an open API. It could operate in terms of user facing pages for people to interact with - or be like a network of chat bots.

You are basing this entire hypothesis on the basis that computer architectures are what you imagine them to be today, which is an invalid assumption.

> You are basing this entire hypothesis on the basis that computer architectures are what you imagine them to be today, which is an invalid assumption.*

It seems to me that you are the one who is pulling in details from today, asserting that they must be incorporated into any law, and then pointing out how that's a bad idea.

My lone assumption is a business that provides user-facing software. That's it. With that assumption, I'm arguing for the principle that when a business provides customers a human-targeted "UI", they need to provide a corresponding machine-usable "API" that bypasses the accidental complexity of human interaction. We know there must be a machine-friendly format before the user-friendly format, because the software is itself operating on a machine.

>> the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.

> Well this isn’t what you said before.

This is what I said before. Having some type of public API is not "architecture". It's mandating open access to the same thing any front end needs to access anyway.

Authentication and sign up: It's a public API, so this is irrelevant for read access. For ordering, the same exact account system as using the web/app UI. You keep ignoring existing implementations, pretending like what I'm saying would require some huge ground-up design rather than tweaks to what already exists.

Data formats: The company. If a company is big enough to dictate formats, then they're big enough for developers to pay attention to. After the custom of using aggregators for shopping becomes commonplace, it becomes in their own interest to stick with common formats rather than get left behind.

Bugs: The company, while leaving the old "buggy" version in place for some period of time.

In general, you seem to be succumbing to the programmers-don't-understand-the-law trap whereby you're imagining that any such law would be useless since a company could just deliberately create an unusable API. But courts see right through those type of "bad faith" approaches.

> It seems to me that you are the one who is pulling in details from today, asserting that they must be incorporated into any law, and then pointing out how that's a bad idea.

You say this but then go on to pull in far more detail from today than I have...

> My lone assumption is a business that provides user-facing software. That's it. With that assumption, I'm arguing for the principle that when a business provides customers a human-targeted "UI", they need to provide a corresponding machine-usable "API" that bypasses the accidental complexity of human interaction. We know there must be a machine-friendly format before the user-friendly format, because the software is itself operating on a machine.

False. Actual machine friendly formats are not the same as the data structures that power UIs.

>> the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility. > Well this isn’t what you said before. >This is what I said before. Having some type of public API is not "architecture". It's mandating open access to the same thing any front end needs to access anyway.

As already stated, the front end is not the same thing as an api suitable for clients. Maintaining a stable API is quite different from building a front-end site.

> Authentication and sign up: It's a public API, so this is irrelevant for read access.

Is it? Front ends often require sign up for read access. Why wouldn’t an API?

> For ordering, the same exact account system as using the web/app UI.

Wait - I thought your idea was architecture neutral. Why are you talking about the web ui?

> You keep ignoring existing implementations, pretending like what I'm saying would require some huge ground-up design rather than tweaks to what already exists.

Ahh, so this is just about how things are built today with minor tweaks.

> Data formats: The company. If a company is big enough to dictate formats, then they're big enough for developers to pay attention to.

Ok, so your law requires people to dictate formats?

> After the custom of using aggregators for shopping becomes commonplace, it becomes in their own interest to stick with common formats rather than get left behind.

Aggregators owned by whom? Google, Facebook, Amazon?

> Bugs: The company, while leaving the old "buggy" version in place for some period of time.

Seems like you have just introduced an architectural requirement to be able to run old versions in parallel with new ones. Who determines the person of time?

> you're imagining that any such law would be useless since a company could just deliberately create an unusable API. But courts see right through those type of "bad faith" approaches.

You are the only one talking about bad faith. I’m simply pointing out that supporting API clients requires architecture that is different from only supporting UI visitors.

If you are iterating on the UI frequently, and changing the structures that supports that UI, the by definition you don’t have a stable API unless you engineer one separately. No bad faith needed.

> You say this but then go on to pull in far more detail from today than I have...

I'm referencing details that today's businesses are already operating with. I'm not proposing them to be part of the law, but analyzing how a generally abstract law would be applied to today's implementations.

> Actual machine friendly formats are not the same as the data structures that power UIs.

You're right. I tried to simplify by leaving off the network, and that was a mistake. It is true, a business offering in-person user-facing software would have to design a protocol to get the data out of memory (ie a security boundary). But when a business offers the software over a communications network, such serialization formats are already a requirement. So I do have a second assumption of a communications network.

> Front ends often require sign up for read access

I have yet to see a popular consumer store that requires a signin to browse products.

> Wait - I thought your idea was architecture neutral. Why are you talking about the web ui?

Because we're still talking about businesses who have chosen to make their software available over the web. That is complexity that they've chosen.

> Aggregators owned by whom? Google, Facebook, Amazon?

Whomever, at your own individual choice, as they're not bound by network effects of selling products as well. I'd personally choose a local client from the apt repository or nixpkgs.

> If you are iterating on the UI frequently, and changing the structures that supports that UI, the by definition you don’t have a stable API

So you're telling me that the back end engineers at Amazon just make whatever changes they feel like, remove the old version, and the front end engineers just deal? Or when the front end engineers want some additional data, they simply edit the backend code and deploy it directly?

In reality, there is versioning and change control going on internal to any large company. But once again you're blindfolding yourself to the common structure and customs that already exist, only to throw your hands up.

I really don't see how we can productively continue this conversation, as you keep superficially dragging in orthogonal complexity and then point outing how complex it is, rather than focusing on my proposal as stated.

FWIW, look at the EU's mandate for a common charging connector that both avoided locking in one implementation forever, while leveraging modern industry consensus to provide a massive market benefit.

> So you're telling me that the back end engineers at Amazon just make whatever changes they feel like, remove the old version, and the front end engineers just deal? Or when the front end engineers want some additional data, they simply edit the backend code and deploy it directly?

No - they work as a team and make changes together without any regard for the needs of API consumers outside their company.

This is exactly the point.

Front and back end teams work together to make changes and don’t have to maintain a stable API for any other consumers.

> look at the EU's mandate for a common charging connector that both avoided locking in one implementation

If I was interviewing someone for a technical role and they told me that APIs were like charging connectors, I would say ‘no hire’, and complain to the recruiter.

> you keep superficially dragging in orthogonal complexity

It’s not orthogonal.

Your argument seems to be that supporting external API clients in addition to an in-house UI imposes no burden on someone’s architecture.

This is patently false.

If you could accept that there are architectural constraints imposed by your demand, then it would be possible to reason about them, but simply denying them leads nowhere.

> Front and back end teams work together to make changes and don’t have to maintain a stable API for any other consumers.

So you agree that they already have to maintain stable APIs for each other? Meaning the mandate would be just adding a requirement for external visibility into the existing internal process, not anything significantly different from what they're already doing.

> If I was interviewing someone for a technical role and they told me that APIs were like charging connectors, I would say ‘no hire’, and complain to the recruiter.

So are you closed minded to analogies in general, don't appreciate that the physical layer has its own complexity, or what? The same type of arguments you're making were also levied at micro USB, by companies trying to keep their bespoke proprietary connectors so they could charge $50 for a spare phone charger. In the end they lost and the market benefited.

> Your argument seems to be that supporting external API clients in addition to an in-house UI imposes no burden

I agree there's a "burden". It's a small burden. One easy bound on this burden is that it is much less effort than developing a mobile app or another whole website specifically for mobile users. And most companies have eagerly done both.

> If you could accept that there are architectural constraints imposed by your demand

You keep using this word architecture. The current de facto deliverable includes XML or JSON documents. The deliverable for the mandate would be differently-formatted XML or JSON documents. Calling a second formatting an "architectural constraint" is a stretch.