Comment by jauntywundrkind
16 hours ago
OpenAPI is a replacement for web browsing. Mostly for businesses. WebMCP nicely supplements your web browsing.
16 hours ago
OpenAPI is a replacement for web browsing. Mostly for businesses. WebMCP nicely supplements your web browsing.
Explain.
WebMCP is mediated by the browser/page & has the full context of the user's active page/session available to it.
Websites that do offer real APIs usually have them as fairly separate things from the web's interface. So there's this big usability gap, where what you do on the API doesn't show up clearly on the web. If the user is just hitting API endpoints unofficially, it can create even worse unexpected split brain problems!
WebMCP offers something new: programmatic control endpoints that work well with what the user is actually seeing. A carefully crafted API can offer that, but this seamless interoperation of browsing and webmcp programmatic control is a novel very low impedance tie together that I find greatly promising for users, in a way that APIs never were.
And the starting point is far far less technical, which again just reduces that impedance mismatch that is so daunting about APIs.
The whole point of an agent, though, is to overcome obstacles to accomplish tasks on your behalf. And since an agent is a computer program, the most efficient way to accomplish tasks using computer services is though APIs. Websites are first and foremost human interfaces, not computer interfaces.
Having an agent use a browser to accomplish tasks on the principal’s behalf is a backstop. It’s for when service providers refuse to implement APIs—and they frequently refuse to do this on purpose. And I expect they will continue to make it as difficult as possible for agents to automate website-based extraction for the same reason they don’t provide APIs. If you thought Captcha solving was a nuisance already, expect it to get worse.
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