[peckrob]

20 years ago or so I wrote a LiveJournal client that used the XML-RPC interface. At the time the choices were that or an older custom text interface. The XML-RPC interface was more understandable to a very beginning developer and even then there were libraries I could use in Visual Basic that took care of all the hard parts. The worst part was that not everything was available via the XML interface so you still had to drop back to the old text interface for some things.

While yeah it’s pretty dated by modern standards at the time it was a revelation that you could build standard-based APIs that anyone could use with a simple library and without having to write a TON of custom code.

And regardless, it was far easier to implement than SOAP, which was just a mistake unless you are fully immersed in the Java ecosystem.