APIs First
So while this has nothing to do with RWD I think it’s a valuable way to think about building anything on the web. If you think about how you might need to extract content onto a web page (or app, or search engine, or widget on someone else’s site) you start to break down in the individual components and think about how they might be useful, how they might relate to each other, how they might be queried etc. As you do this you begin to see other opportunities for the content, but you also realise you might need data applied to the content elements that isn’t seen but needed to provide the right information at the right time. It’s a really worthwhile thing to do.
Designing web service APIs can be a tricky art form. APIs serve as a virtual playbook necessary for interacting with your business domain, and more importantly, they are the contracts that bind service owners with their consumers. Therefore, getting design right early on is an important part of the service engineering we do at Squarespace.
An excerpt from APIs First
