Re: crawling the web

[Norman Ramsey <nr@...>]

 > On 6/11/08, Matthew M. Burke <matthew@bluedino.net> wrote:
 > > Norman Ramsey wrote:
 > > > P.S. If I sound cranky, it's because I've spent 2 years working on
 > > > APIs for email management and spam filtering, and they are still too
 > > > complicated.  I will give a talk at the Lua Workshop in July.
 > > >
 > > Not to steal any thunder from your talk, but "too complicated" because of
 > > Lua or because it's just a tough problem to come up with a good API?
 > 
 > The latter, I would presume. Dealing with email programmatically is
 > one of these horrible problems that looks easy before you start. Just
 > the interface that allows navigating the parts of a MIME email can end
 > up remarkable ugly in no time at all (I've rewritten my take on this
 > three times already, and it's still crap).

Indeed.  After two years I would say we are one small step above crap :-)


Norman