Would anyone be opposed to a "partial-content" call in the api that would return a particular section of a media-wiki page. This could be provided by adding a "rvpath=" option to the "prop=revisions" call, that adds a path to a particular session.
So for example api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&titles=Telephone&rvprop=timestamp|user|comment|content&rvpath=History.Early%20Development would return the early development subsection of the history section of the telephone article.
One would the need an additional call to return the section tree of a document, perhaps: api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvprop=sections.
The motivation behind this would be (a) To reduce bandwidth use for certain types of queries. (b) To prevent client programs from having to parse so much html by hand.
In this could be implemented on the server without too much overhead, since the section tree could be cached, and needs to be calculated when rendering a document to create tables of content.
Is this a terribly bad idea? Is this syntax okay?
Thanks very much. Tom Wright