Afternoon all,
The reason we want a simple API is that it be approachable. It's easier for people write to SMTP, HTTP, etc. because they can kick the tyres and learn the ropes with telnet:
$ telnet www.google.com 80
Trying 209.85.227.103...
Connected to www.l.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.google.fr/
<snip>
This is good, and a strong motivator for us to make it easy for implementors to provide a text rendering.
That said it just dawned on me that with both Microsoft and Google (among others) strategically backing AtomPub, it will be impossible to claim with a straight face to be a cloud developer if you don't know it yourself. IOW, cloud developers will already necessarily have exposure to, and in many cases intimate knowledge of, AtomPub.
Regardless of how simple our simple protocol is, everyone's going to be starting from scratch. Yet again oversimplification could well raise the bar... we need to be as simple as possible but no more.
Whatever we do we need to make sure the very first step is as low as possible.
Sam