Re:Ask HN: Is it time for a REST specification?
by daliwali on Thursday July 20, 2017 @02:01PM
(#14814864)
Formal specs[0][1][2][3] have existed for years, not necessarily from the W3C.
All of them suffer from a chicken or egg problem. Without servers following specs, there won't be clients. Without spec-based clients, servers will continue to serve ad hoc formats.
Actually it is kind of a miracle that the web was standardized around HTML and not thousands of competing markup formats. We have JSON as a defacto standard for a machine format, but it lacks semantics, which is where JSON-LD comes into play.
I have not actually seen an API using JSON-LD in the wild, but it looks promising and is a W3C recommendation. The spec says nothing about building APIs and it looks kind of ugly with all of its @ prefixes, which is where Micro API[2] comes into play.
All of them suffer from a chicken or egg problem. Without servers following specs, there won't be clients. Without spec-based clients, servers will continue to serve ad hoc formats.
Actually it is kind of a miracle that the web was standardized around HTML and not thousands of competing markup formats. We have JSON as a defacto standard for a machine format, but it lacks semantics, which is where JSON-LD comes into play.
I have not actually seen an API using JSON-LD in the wild, but it looks promising and is a W3C recommendation. The spec says nothing about building APIs and it looks kind of ugly with all of its @ prefixes, which is where Micro API[2] comes into play.
[0] http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html
[1] http://www.hydra-cg.com/
[2] http://micro-api.org/
[3] I did not include JSON API, since it does not make hypermedia a requirement.