How APIs encourage the separation of content and presentation »

From the dawn of the web, we've been entangling presentation with content. Which is, overall, a big suck. Why? Well, on one hand, it's fine for people to consume. But it's really rude to computers. And computers, after all, are doing all the work to keep the Internet running.

If computers can't easily parse data, they can't do anything meaningful with it. However, once computers can easily disentangle the layers of data, watch out: innovation happens like crazy.

In a series of blog posts I'm going to talk about all the beauty of separating content from presentation. And how that simple idea when amplified with proven, existing design patterns makes things really interesting. Let's start with Twitter as an example...

When you view tweets on twitter.com, you see shared links, hashtags, and @mentions, all of which are clickable. But if you query the Twitter API you get back plain text. Why?

Because Twitter understands the importance of separating the content layer from the presentation layer. Imagine seeing this on a phone:

Ran into <a href="http://twitter.com/shanley">@shanley</a> at <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23sxsw">#sxsw</a>!

… because the SMS app on that old phone didn't understand HTML! Furthermore, when every character counts, like in a 160 character SMS message, markup would end up dominating the content. You shouldn't even assume that the consumer device will even know what to do with it.

So instead, Twitter keeps statuses as simple as possible—text only. This is plain, vanilla content. No markup, just data (well, unless you count the "organic" markup conventions like hashtags and @mentions).

Everything else, all the rest of the CSS and HTML that make up the twitter.com experience—that's the presentation layer. It takes all that content and makes it look good.

APIs, at their most basic, are carriers of content. They are perfectly evolved for getting data from one place to another.

And this is super-important in today's world, where we consume content on multiple devices. One size no longer fits all. There is no single form-factor. Each device offers a different experience of the same content.

This is just one example why APIs are changing the way we develop, by demanding the best-practice approach of separating the content and presentation layers. Modern web applications use the same APIs that their official mobile apps do. And those are the same APIs that get exposed to 3rd party developers who innovate around the edges.