On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Robert Ullmann rlullmann@gmail.com wrote:
I'm sorry to say that it is simply a requirement that the GUI be treated as a stabilized API that cannot be changed without checking the effect on client software, and that this state of affairs will continue until the pybot et al are completely converted to the API, and time enough has passed that people have gotten the API version and are using it. This probably means a year or more.
The GUI is served in the format of an HTML form. It will always, guaranteed, be submittable as an HTML form. If you attempt to treat it as some chunk of regex-able text instead of an HTML form, your client *will* break, because it *is not* some chunk of regex-able text. Any client that ignores the standards governing the use of HTML forms and doesn't submit all fields is not something we are interested in supporting. If Pywikipediabot tries to submit the form but refuses to do it properly, it may break, and that's their problem for not doing it properly.
Of course, maybe it's inconvenient to have to parse an HTML form. I actually find it hard to believe that there aren't easily usable frameworks for doing this. But regardless, if your problem is that it's inconvenient to do something correctly, the fix you should request is a more convenient way to do it correctly, not a large and obnoxious (to us) change in the established semantics of the existing manner of submission. What you're asking is for us to inconvenience ourselves and give consideration to non-standard and non-endorsed manners of interacting with our software, for your convenience as an author of tools that interact with it, when there already exist standard and endorsed ways for you to accomplish your goals, and we're not going to do that.
If we had changed the semantics of existing required form fields (e.g. renaming "wpTextbox1"), you could complain with some legitimacy, because before very recently there was no possible way for you to write a bot that would be robust against such changes. But if you had written your bots correctly in the first place, there would have been no problem with hidden fields actually becoming required, because in the semantics of HTML you're already required to submit them, and you're ignoring that, and your tools are going to break because of it, and we aren't sympathetic.
For the future, clearly, you want to use the edit API and avoid all these issues.