still don't have a title

Decoupling Presentation from Logic

Reading Sam’s platform, I applaud his plans to sex up our web appearance which is IMHO overdue.

While redesigning our website shouldn’t be much of a technical problem, redesigning our BTS could become one:

I noticed that reportbug and bts are basically querying the BTS via HTTP as a user would, grepping the source of the html-reply for the information they need afterwards. While this works pretty good in most situations it has the major drawback that those tools unnecessarily depend on the presentation of the BTS, making it harder to redesign it.

A possible and easy to implement solution would be to allow a special parameter in the URL-request which triggers an answer in a machine readable format (like flatfile or XML) rather than a human readable. This would also have the additional benefit of saving bandwidth and computation power.