API Endpoints: Serving HTML, JSON, or Text

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]An API endpoint, I put in a URL into an API. Sometimes you get a web page that's HTML. It serves you back HTML. It's great if everything could render HTML, right? So, if if I could survey it That would be like a web view, what we would call in an app in a web view. It's just like a virtual browser. So, API endpoints can serve HTML. They can serve JSON. They can serve text documents, right? JSON is what you get when you just serve data. And if you notice, if you've ever seen with LLMs, sometimes people will put in a prompt and they're like, "Make sure you return JSON that looks like this because we're trying to get the content back in a structured form that a programming language could read and access the pieces, right? If you just get like a blob of text, how is my program supposed to interpret that, right? You as a human read the text, that's great for you, the human the the computer to human communication, but for computer to computer communication, I need the I'd either need an LLM to output HTML or in most cases we're looking for JSON, and then we take that data and we