I've been wading through yet another needlessly complex 3rd party API, and I'm about to hit the breaking point. I think that developers simply default to compl

I've been wading through yet another needlessly complex 3rd party API, and I'm about to hit the breaking point. I think that developers simply default to complexity when they can't think of anything better to do. When tasked with building an API for their thing, they'll look around for something to pattern it after, and do that. Unfortunately, the most visible APIs around are from Amazon, which all deal with cash money and therefore need to be super secure. The end result is that we end up doing silly crypto tricks and parsing JSON just to embed somebody's widget onto a page. I figured I'd put forth a counterexample to show how simple a public API can actually be and still be useful.