You're missing the whole point. He's not proposing "Web scraping" for data at all. He's proposing to use a single unique identifier for a resource, its URL. Thi

You're missing the whole point. He's not proposing "Web scraping" for data at all. He's proposing to use a single unique identifier for a resource, its URL. This identifier should provide both the presentation, and the data. So you wouldn't "scrape" this URL for its data, you would simply content negotiate a machine-friendly version and use that instead. He's essentially saying that instead of having both http://foo/myresource http://foo/myresource and http://foo/api/myresource.json http://foo/api/myresource.json, it's much more beneficial to have a single identifier for that resource, not two. I'd even go further and say that a resource should also be linked to other data. This is the idea behind Linked Data which is essentially building a distributed database of datasets using this exact technique. This is why unique identifiers are important, because then people can reuse them and link to them. I'd suggest to look at Tim Berners-Lee presentation on this subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM6XIICm_qo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM6XIICm_qo And also perhaps a small presentation I did to explain this very specific subject: http://www.genebanks.org/tutorials/the-power-of-linked-data http://www.genebanks.org/tutorials/the-power-of-linked-data