Thread:Talk:Requests for comment/API Future/Reduce the amount of query parameters/reply (2)

Sorry I should have been clearer - I wasn't suggesting every single thing under the sun but was trying to explain that sensible defaults are important. It would be good to review frequently used parameters and provide these by default (by the way any new API design should take into existing usage).

To take an example, if I'm getting an image at the very least I should be able to expect enough information to 1) create a thumbnail of that image 2) in the size of my choice which 3) links to the file page. It might also be important to serve the license to encourage fair reuse. This seems like a very common task that other API users would want to make use of. We should start any new API design from how our developers want to use it and how they are using it. Sometimes there might be clever ways to provide these changes without adding additional processing. For example to avoid thumbnail generation one could imagine placing a $1 in the url of the thumbnail to allow the size of an image to be chosen by the user via a simple string substitution.

I've been using the API for quite some time now for mobile apps and the mobile site and have found myself frustrated about the amount of things I have to additionally request that seem obvious to me. I will try and point these out now I know this page exists when I encounter them.

We must also remember that if you do not provide sensible defaults we are making our api difficult to learn and turning developers away (the other day I spoke to a very experienced developer in London who said they were looking at the api but found it so confusing they decided to use Flickr instead).