My user script (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24398) offers an option to poll the API for new updates and insert them in the page -- what every normal twitter client does, basically.
Only this twitter "client", being a user script, hasn't got a UI of its own -- the twitter.com site is the UI. When a new update is detected, I receive it as JSON but then I have to go through a painful step of generating HTML markup to match the markup of Twitter.com for a single update. This code can be seen here: http://gist.github.com/67592 This step is also very fragile: when Twitter.com changes markup (which it does a lot lately), this script generates obsolete HTML. If the API for getting updates provided HTML fragments instead of JSON, I could simply insert the received HTML in the page. Will this extension of the API ever be considered? Technically, this should be trivial to implement -- the response would be a rendered view partial. In fact, Twitter already implemented it as part of the Ajax API for the web. When you post an update from the main form on the site, an Ajax request submits the update and gets JSON in return -- only this JSON includes nothing more than a few properties with HTML fragments to be inserted in appropriate places. Another place where Twitter.com returns HTML fragments for Ajax requests is pagination. The unreleased version of Endless Tweets (my user script) already uses this web API to preload pages while the user scrolls down. Thanks
