Best practice for requesting web content

[bsod99]

Hi, I'm just starting my first mobile app with LiveCode and it will be essentially a streamlined version of a website, with some added features specific to the app. The website is PHP/MySQL driven and I'm wondering what the best approach is with regards the app requesting remote data for use within the app. The web content would be a mixture of text and media, all output in XHTML. I'd want to grab the data I need and insert it into placeholders in the app templates. I'm assuming it's better to set up a custom API for the app, e.g returning XML or JSON data?