When I talk about how much I believe in APIs, all I am really saying is how much I believe in the web. The web is how humans are consuming and sharing data, content, and algorithms with each other using the Internet, and APIs are how systems, applications, and devices are doing this via the Internet.
I do not advocate for any single API, company, tooling, or technology. I am evangelizing for an open web. This is why I am always a little ashamed at how incomplete my understanding is of the core concepts that make up the web and the specifications that are driving it. Thankfully there are people like Erik Wilde (@dret) who work tirelessly to help us understand them, and make available in a simple way like he did with his Web Concepts project.
Erik has organized 13 Web Concepts for use to learn about, detailing 445 distinct specifications across the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Java Community Process (JCP) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There are a number of these specifications I'm already aware of, but there are numerous others I am not, and that just isn't right.
To help me increase my awareness and hopefully yours as well, I'm going to regularly tweet out individual concepts, and their specifications, linking to Erik's work. I encourage you to bookmark his work and get to work improving your web literacy where possible, and consider forking his work and sharing within your organization as well. It is important that we are all aware of these core building blocks of the web, and are reusing existing concepts and specifications across our work, wherever possible.
