Over the past decade, the internet has seen a transition from
single-task protocols to the web to the extent that new functionality
is often only exposed as a web-API with a proprietary protocol.

While the base protocol (HTTP) and information serialization (HTML,
XML, JSON) is standardized, the methods for extracting information
from the received data varies from website to website.

The solution in the 1990s was to make a standardized protocol,
e.g. IMAP or NNTP, which could be used to access email or news in a
standardized manner.

For interacting with, say, google mail, however, a client application
will have to speak the google mail API which is incompatible with the
mail API of another provider. This transition is turning the internet
into a collection of walled gardens with the obvious drawback that
most websites -- if an API is present at all -- will only have the
official client implementation to said API available. Mostly there
will be a few closed-source implementations provided by the vendor,
most commonly a combination of the following:

* a website (often with mandatory javascript)

* a mobile website (possibly without javascript, but optimized for small screens and thus not very practical on a desktop browser and often not exposing all available features)

* Android or iPhone app (sometimes not exposing all available features, restricted to a single platform)

leaving users little choice in case they are using a different
platform or want to collect their data in a unified format.

Even worse is receiving information from websites where no API exists.
There is no standard for logging into websites which have a
mandatory username/password login prompt and implementations will have to
handle cookies, referer headers (ridiculously many website mandate one for
XSRF protection even though the standard makes them optional) and site
specific form locations to which POST and GET requests will need
to be made in a site specific order.

For the most part, there has been no effort in changing any aspect
of this problem, which has existed for more than 10 years. On the
contrary, companies have consecutively started to discontinue
support for open web standards such as RSS/Atom.

Conclusion: The web as it is now is harmful to the open standard  
culture of the internet.

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Original can be found on Usenet at comp.infosystems.gemini, this is merely a repost.