Here is a 363 word article comparing APIs and web scraping:

Accessing Data on Websites: APIs vs Web Scraping

When building an application that needs data from an external website, developers have two main options to retrieve that data - using the website's API or scraping the public webpages. Both approaches have tradeoffs to consider.

What is an API?

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of protocols and tools for building software applications. Many websites provide APIs that allow developers to access data in a structured format, instead of needing to scrape the HTML pages. For example:

{
  "postTitle": "Hello World", 
  "author": "Mary",
  "content": "This is my first blog post!"
}

APIs provide data already formatted in an easy way for code to consume. APIs often require authentication as well.

When to Use APIs

APIs are great when available because they provide:

The downside is that not all sites offer APIs, or they may limit access. APIs can also change without notice, breaking applications that rely on them.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping refers to programmatically grabbing data from HTML webpages. Scrapers parse through the HTML elements to extract information. For example, a scraper could pull news headlines, author names, publish dates etc.

Web scrapers work on any public website since they rely only on HTML structure. However, they are more brittle since changes to the HTML can break the scrapers.

When to Scrape

Web scraping should be used when:

So in summary - prefer APIs when available, but web scraping opens up flexibility to access data from anywhere. Evaluate both options to pick the right approach for your application needs.