On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Robert Ullmann <rlullmann(a)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.