I see a million use cases: no-code data scraping, analytics, feeds, notifications etc. Just think of the web as a giant database with URLs as table names and CSS selectors as column names. I started to work on it about half a year ago after I got tired of writing Python scripts every time I needed to join subsets of various online databases.

This is amazing. I've been exactly thinking recently about the state of computing we're in: we keep using programming languages to build full solutions, which barely derive from something that already does the same but with a different color. How many times do we need to reinvent a forum ? Synchronous and asynchronous communication ? Social networks ?

I want to have a better, synchronized feed reader. I can install one of the many choices of full-stack solutions, with integrated clients, open protocols, etc. Or I can use my existing IMAP server to store it all, and have it already synchronized for free. Not only is the protocol open, but it is already widely known and is generic enough that it can be used for many usecases.

I want my RSS feeds in my IMAP. I want my Pleroma discussions in my IMAP. I want my HN discussions in my IMAP. Building upon existing solutions and interconnect them rather than taking the programming language and create something from scratch.

I'd love to take a test drive whenever you need an alpha tester. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username.

Very interesting proposition.

Is there any further info and any similar work on this subject?

> Just think of the web as a giant database with URLs as table names and CSS selectors as column names

Is this a reinvention of YQL? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Query_Language