Attached is the first version of the unAPI spec. Excerpting:

    <p>"unAPI is a simple website <span class="caps">API</span> convention.  There are many wonderful APIs and protocols for syndicating, searching, and harvesting content from diverse services on the web.  They're all <strong>great</strong>, and they're all already <strong>widely used</strong>, but they're all <strong>different</strong>.  We want <strong>one <span class="caps">API</span></strong> for the most basic operations necessary to perform simple clipboard-copy functions across all sites.  We also want this <span class="caps">API</span> to be able to be easily layered on top of other well-known APIs."</p>

And:

    <p>"The objective of unAPI is to enable web sites with <span class="caps">HTML</span> interfaces to information-rich objects to simultaneously publish richly structured metadata for those objects, or those objects themselves, in a predictable and consistent way for machine processing."</p>

This specification is being developed under the ROGUE 05 process. The next revision, revision 1, is due on Thursday, 16 Feb 2006, and is dependent on at least three working implementations to move forward. That date is also day 2 of code4lib 2006; I will be speaking about unAPI on day 1, and hopefully we’ll have a breakout session following up the talk which will be a great time to discuss the spec, to try implementing it, and to work on revision 1 for release the next day. :)

We are tracking milestones, notes, and document revisions within a private basecamp project, but interested parties are welcome to participate (contact me for access).

The list of record for unAPI development is the gcs-pcs-list. Please send questions/comments/implementation feedback there.