Google Toolbar API – Guide to Making Custom Button – aaaargh. I see Google’s recreated the OpenSearch Description format. Nice job guys. Oh yeah, and it also functions as an RSS feed information thingy…. which as far as I can tell, only provides refresh rate…. if they need that so badly they could make that element an extension to RSS/Atom.
It seems like Google’s attitude nowadays is “developers like APIs, and they like XML, so lets create lots and lots of little tiny APIs and new XML formats.” How about a new search API, like for images. The web search API was last updated years ago… . Oh, in case we’re counting, Google now has created XML formats for sitemaps (but they accept RSS and Atom, so what was the point?), homepage modules (why not use HTML, as I’ve written before?), “buttons” (Google Toolbar), 50 (exaggeration) kinds of microcontent (Google Base), etc.
More later when I get back from school and have time to look into this more fully.