"hg log" for remote repositories?

[Marcin Kasperski]

> This is for use in a GUI app that will display the files and
> revision history.  I'd like it to be able to work [at least
> partially] on remote repositories as well as local ones.
>
> (...)
>
>     We could do log over the wire,
>     but it would be a) very complicated or b) missing lots of features or c)
>     *SLOW*.

Just a looose idea: maybe it would make sense if hg serve offered
the content not only in the form of pure HTML, but also as some
kind of API (XML/RPC?, SOAP?, some other API over HTTP?). This way
people could contemplate binding some GUI apps to such API.

Note that this is *not* about implementing remote commands. The
information served would be exactly the same as what is currently
available would somebody spawn firefox (or, ekhem, tried to parse
HTML...).