[btucker]

This makes me think of the early/mid-2000s & https://blosxom.sourceforge.net. Blosxom had this delightful concept of file extensions as "flavours." For example, you could have a ".rss" flavour that would present that hierarchy of your site as an RSS feed if you added ".rss" to the URL. Brilliant!

[vidarh]

This used to be fairly common. Reddit is another site. A company I worked at.aroind the same time also had .xml, .rss, .atom. .xml would serve up the raw xml our middleware generated, which was normally "rendered" via xsl (what can I say to redeem myself for that?) server side. It was great for both debugging (you could browse the site in "xml mode") and to provide an API.

I still like the url approach - being able to browse until you have the view you need, and then just copy the URL and change format in order to find the right API call can be very nice. The challenge, of course, is that you need to be very cautious about which urls you guarantee will be stable, or you'll be locked into a site structure you might regret.

[djbusby]

> xsl (what can I say to redeem myself for that?)

Why? XSL is awesome even if a little arcane now.

Time makes fools of us all.