Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications
I don't think this can work.It seems to rely on a willingness of the company owning the data to disclose their full data set up you. Currently, with things like GraphQL, we are moving in the opposite direction in that the server only sends you those columns that are absolutely required to fill the fields in your GUI.Since they used it as the example, I don't see any incentive for AirBnb to let random people on the internet download their full internal data tables. Quite to the contrary, AirBnb will block you from accessing their servers if they believe that you are scraping.So this is a new way for users to toy around with the limited incomplete data set that the website operator was willing to give them. But it won't empower users. What if AirBnb implements server-side pagination, so that your client doesn't even receive the data for the cheapest apartment, because it's on a different page?Tools like this would be perfect in theory to enhance social networks like LinkedIn with an export and batch processing capabilities. But the company claiming ownership of your contacts will surely prevent you from actually getting a useful export.Plus there's cases where the data is on a server because it's impractically large. For example, try this to improve your Google search results. Downloading a 100mio row spreadsheet as the first step?