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As I was answering this question, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/66403/find-answers-with-max-upvotes, I found myself wondering, quite late in the game, why there is not an /answers route that allows sort and filter such as /questions.

Is there a systemic reason for this omission or is this an oversight that might be corrected?

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This is linked into the motivations for v1 of the API.

First, we wanted to put everything you could scrape into the API, so there'd be less motivation to do so.

Second, we wanted it to be possible to build read-only versions of the sites using just the API. The theory being that if this were possible, the majority of interesting [app]s would be possible. This is why the (now quite out-classed by the community) WWSOC was our example app.

Naturally, this is not an exhaustive list (leaving out things like "scalable" and "flexible").

/answers (and /comments, /revisions, and probably a few more I'm forgetting) don't really jive with the above. You can't get a stream of new comments or answers anywhere.

Now, that's not to say there never will be an /answers just that it wasn't considered for inclusion into v1. In general, new ways to slice and dice data are great candidates for subsequent API versions.

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    The blog promised v2.0 next year. Will there be an intermediate version?
    – Nathan Osman
    Commented Oct 2, 2010 at 23:00
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    that makes sense. comments and revisions are dependent on a post, i.e. have no value outside the context of a post, whereas a filterable stream of Answers has definite real world value, e.g. find the top rated answers for the tags asp.net sql-server provides a direct route to (possible) guru answers to the type of questions you may be interested in. Think more of research, edificational reading as opposed to 'beeline to solve my problem searching'. I second George's question: What is the possibility of a v1.x?
    – Sky Sanders
    Commented Oct 2, 2010 at 23:38
  • @George - its been discussed, but frankly we don't know. It all depends on scheduling. @Sky - meh, the vast majority of answers have no value without the context of a question (consider all the "Your problem is here line of code..." or "You want to use Class Name..." style answers). But as I said, it'd be an interesting area to explore in > v1.
    – Kevin Montrose
    Commented Oct 3, 2010 at 5:16

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