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A thread 🧵 of _terrible_ design decisions for the internal APIs of the two Italian high speed train operators, Italo and Trenitalia. Hardcoded passwords, terrible translations, spelling mistakes, xml in json (but utf8 encoded and transmitted as an array of numbers), it's all here. Enjoy!

Is it valid XML and JSON at least? I integrated with a transport API many years ago that was XML wrapped in some ancient invalid HTML 3 – only way to reasonably extract anything from it was to go crazy with regexp, at least that was my approach back then

Yes valid JSON, I didn’t look into the XML much

Also reminds me of how often people forget to escape </script> tags when they stringify data to JSON for inclusion in HTML – mixing formats like that is sure to create some oversights and mess