Page:Aaron Swartz s A Programmable Web An Unfinished Work.pdf/19

1. INTRODUCTION: A PROGRAMMABLE WEB    7 of an existing application, as an afterthought or a completely separate piece. But, as we’ll see, when a web application is designed properly, APIs naturally grow out of it and require little effort to maintain.

Then we’ll look into what it means for your application to be not just another tool for people and software to use, but part of the ecology—a section of the programmable web. This means exposing your data to be queried and copied and integrated, even without explicit permission, into the larger software ecosystem, while protecting users’ freedom.

Finally, we’ll close with a discussion of that much-maligned phrase, “the Semantic Web,” and try to understand what it would really mean.

Let’s begin.