intertwingly

Chris Hollander: An extensibility interface should natively provide the most flexible, least constrictive access to the information;  developers should then build abstractions on top of that, as they see fit for their applications.  If all your writing is a simple aggregator, then  take that gorgeous infoset goodness and tie it right up into a neat, object oriented abstraction.  If you want to do something dramatically more dynamic and free form, you'll be happy that you already have the more extensible interface available.

I agree.  IMHO, the API should be an XML based grammer.  There might be great value on some platforms to write a reusable component that is a parser that canonicallizes the input.  Merge all the various date formats into one.  Put both well formed and non-well formed content into an undifferentiated string *shudder*.

Later, if you change your mind and want to handle descriptions separate from content, or to provide the ability to drill into the well formed content, you can change the parser without needing to change the API.