Long term, a new HTTP META method would be interesting. I wonder if something like that has ever been considered. Providers like Cloudflare would hopefully be more lenient with these requests.
Huh. It's certainly an interesting idea! Strictly speaking, individual people could implement this today, since nonstandard HTTP verbs don't break anything that doesn't know to request with them. (It wouldn't be of much use, because clients wouldn't know to use it, but still -- something that could easily be prototyped).
I don't think FAAANG (or any other big players) would have much interest in making it happen in the standard though, since it would undercut their big-player advantage.
Maybe, but not really; seems like this thread is more about intent (“I just want a preview”) while content type is more about representation (“I want the content as json”). I can imagine that there will be websites that are actively using the accept parameter to distinguish between “regular visitors” and have their APIs at the same paths (didn’t Reddit do this at some point?), and thus your approach would break in this case.
I guess what this is really about is, I hate to say it, but something in the direction of the semantic web, where web servers (and in this case, CloudFlare et al) actually gain a deeper understanding of the content they serve, and a web browser / crawler being able to query this content directly.
It seems to me that what "previews" really want is an API for the page's content in a structured format: OpenGraph tags and other microformats are one representation, but it's annoying to have to load _all_ the HTML just to grab title and the OG tags.
Doesn't the oembed spec [1] already solve this? I think the OP could solve their problem by simply creating an oembed endpoint with all the necessary meta data.
