All BLAST URLAPI commands produce HTML output, which is human readable if loaded into a browser or text editor.
NCBI will attempt to make changes to the BLAST URLAPI in a backward compatible manner. However, NCBI reserves the right to change the format of the parameters and the BLAST results. As a result, the format of the returned BLAST report may change with little or no notice. For parsing purposes, we suggest that users format the BLAST results in XML or tabular form.
Examples of changes introduced recently are 'SHOW_CDS_FEATURES' plus the combination of 'MASK_CHAR' and 'MASK_COLOR', which enhance the BLAST output by displaying the translation of the coding regions (CDS) found in the alignment and the filtering of masked regions in colored lowercase, respectively. The 'NEW_VIEW' and its related parameters and functions are also examples of such changes.