REST vs. GraphQL – A search for evidence on which is better

Re:REST vs. GraphQL – A search for evidence on which is better by recursivedoubts on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @02:22PM (#25433932)

I do not think that XML is a hypertext. So I agree with you.

HTML is a hypertext.

Yes, Github probably has one of the most as-REST-like-as-possible JSON apis, and it's mostly wasted effort. It would be just as usable, as an API, without all that stuff, since it is consumed by code, not a browser/human.

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Re:REST vs. GraphQL – A search for evidence on which is better by t-writescode on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @02:24PM (#25433956)

What does HTML have that XML doesn't have? Isn't XML a superset of HTML?

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Re:REST vs. GraphQL – A search for evidence on which is better by gtramont on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @12:46AM (#25439504)

Maybe the following links can help in understanding hypertext/hypermedia?

http://amundsen.com/hypermedia/hfactor/

https://gtramontina.com/h-factors/

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Re:REST vs. GraphQL – A search for evidence on which is better by recursivedoubts on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @02:42PM (#25434150)

It has a hypermedia spec:

https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/

And a bunch of things called "browsers" that implement that spec. More or less.

I mean, come to that, aren't XML and HTML both just text? Isn't text, then, a hypertext? One can embed URLs in text, after all...

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Re:REST vs. GraphQL – A search for evidence on which is better by t-writescode on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @02:54PM (#25434312)

Does this mean that your argument that json can't be a hypertext is because it doesn't already have a universal hypermedia spec?

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Re:REST vs. GraphQL – A search for evidence on which is better by recursivedoubts on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @03:52PM (#25435095)

The language here is getting a little squirrly. "Can't be a hypertext" is too restrictive. "Isn't a hypertext" is how I would say it.

JSON as JSON isn't a hypertext in the same way that XML as XML isn't a hypertext. XHTML is a hypertext based on XML. (HTML itself isn't proper XML.)

There are hypertext specs based on JSON, such as: https://json-schema.org/draft-04/json-schema-hypermedia.html

But, without clients that treat the data as a uniform interface, it's all mostly pointless, which is why most JSON APIs stop at Level 2 of the Richardson Maturity Model, and why things like GraphQL are becoming more and more popular.

In the original model of the web (which is what Fielding was describing w/ REST) where HTML was being delivered to a browser, the uniform interface works: a browser has no idea what the HTML document means but can render it to a form that the human looking at it can make sense of.

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Re:REST vs. GraphQL – A search for evidence on which is better by t-writescode on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @10:07PM (#25438584)

Thank you for clarifying your stance

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