# Web APIs & services | | A **Web Service** (WS) is either:a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a network, serving web documents. | |-|-| | | wikipedia:: [Web service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_service) | |  | A **Web API** is an application programming interface (API) for either a web server or a web browser. As a web development concept, it can be related to a web application's client side. A server-side web API consists of one or more publicly exposed endpoints to a defined request–response message system, typically expressed in JSON or XML by means of an HTTP-based web server. A server API (SAPI) is not considered a server-side web API, unless it is publicly accessible by a remote web application. | |-|-| | | wikipedia:: [Web API](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_API) | a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. [[API]] ## Web APIs - APIs connected over the Internet - Web APIs often use machine-based interactions such as REST and SOAP. RESTful web APIs are typically loosely based on HTTP methods to access resources via URL-encoded parameters and the use of JSON or XML to transmit data. By contrast, SOAP protocols are standardized by the W3C and mandate the use of XML as the payload format, typically over HTTP. Furthermore, SOAP-based Web APIs use XML validation to ensure structural message integrity, by leveraging the XML schemas provisioned with WSDL documents. ### [[REST & RESTful]] ### [[GraphQL]] ### [[SOAP]] ### [[Public Web API Providers]] ## [[Data Transport, Serialization Formats & Configuration Files]] ## [[Ajax (programming)]] ## [[Microservices]] ## [[RPC]] ## [[Webhooks]] ## [[Endpoints]] ## Embedding ### Tweets, Instagram pics in another webpage, e.g.