This is a footnote to Dan’s posting on 404s and 200s. Judging from the logs, the unAPI posting here caused some confusion for someone’s BlogBridge 2.13 desktop RSS aggregator, when it tried to follow one of the unAPI links. Evidently puzzled by the 300 Multiple Choices status code, BlogBridge called the same link again. And again. It stopped about four hours later (no doubt when the machine was shut down), having made 5438 calls. Since then the same client has returned to fetch RSS feeds but it hasn’t touched the unAPI links.

I suppose we’re likely to run into a lot of cases like this, as we try to make the human-readable web more machine-readable. Where the more esoteric aspects of the standards have been glossed over, it’s like we’re screen-scraping at the protocol level.