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From the "Thinking out loud department" : Subscriptions and APIs

Every few days, I peek at the front page for the O'Reilly website. I used to do it largely because I couldn't remember the URL for the beta chapters page. The beta chapters are gone, but I still make a habit of looking anyway. Today I noticed a new push for their online book widget, Safari. I'm not a big fan of online books so I'm not about to sign up anytime soon. But, out of curiousity, I did a search on umask perl just to see what came back. And that got me thinking that I might pay money if there were a framework and an API such that I could build some sort of interactive man widget to query the Safari servers. Something along the lines of...



$> safari perl umask



Your query returned [2] options:



[1] Programming Perl, yadda yadda yadda



[2] Perl in a Nutshell, yadda yadda yadda



Please choose one: 1







[ and so on and so on... ]



...which presumably have support for open-ended queries like this.

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