Thread:Talk:Requests for comment/API Future/"'flags' parameter should replace all the boolean flags"/reply (2)

Personally, I think the interface is cleaner with boolean parameters rather than cramming unrelated flags into a "flags" parameter just because they're flags. It's different for something like xxprop, where you're selecting which properties to return so there is a relationship.

By "presense" items, I mean things like the "missing" in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=jsonfm&action=query&titles=DoesNotExist, where the page is missing if the "missing" key is present and not missing if the "missing" key is not present. Most clients are going to have to use something like isset or an explicit comparison to the empty string, because in most languages both undefined/null and the empty string are considered "false".

It would also be nice if flags in the request would recognize "0" as false rather than true. But since everywhere else in MediaWiki &foo=0 is interpreted as "foo is set" and since we'd probably want to keep interpreting no-value-specified (i.e. empty string) as true, I'm not sure whether that would really be the least astonishing behavior.