I kind of agree and don't. You could say HTTP+DOM is the API, we're already there. But it lacks the structure and a more explicit regularity (in part because it's meant for human consumption, not programming). And if you were to describe the whole protocol (including CSS and JS as they can change ordering, even content, of what's shown) it's incredibly more complicated than the equivalent, distilled representation.
There are efforts going back at least fifteen years to extract ontologies from natural language [0] and HTML structure [1].
Comments
I kind of agree and don't. You could say HTTP+DOM is the API, we're already there. But it lacks the structure and a more explicit regularity (in part because it's meant for human consumption, not programming). And if you were to describe the whole protocol (including CSS and JS as they can change ordering, even content, of what's shown) it's incredibly more complicated than the equivalent, distilled representation.
There are efforts going back at least fifteen years to extract ontologies from natural language [0] and HTML structure [1].
[0]: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... (2010) [PDF]
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2009.02.011 (2009)