Rewire the web. YQL Guide. Query Language. Yahoo to Developers: YQL Will Soon Be The Gateway to All Yahoo D. While the technology that underpins web services is mostly standard (HTTP, JSON, XML etc), there are few standards that dictate the functionality of the actual web service APIs.
As an example, despite the fact that Twitter and Facebook share a lot of functionality, that functionality is exposed through interfaces that have very little in common. For developers this means developing an application that does something as simple as “post a message” involves learning two separate APIs. YQL is a service from Yahoo that implements a SQL like language for accessing web services.