Re:Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API
by icebraining on Wednesday June 05, 2013 @02:58AM
(#5824106)
The concept of putting URLs in the document is not just so that you can re-arrange them, it's so that you can use HATEOAS.
Example: think of posts here on HN. One thing a specific media format would include is a "reply" link, but on hellbanned posts that link would absent, so that state would be inaccessible to clients.
Or say you've used comments on your blog, so each post has a link to the list of comments about it. Now you switch to Disqus, and so you could change the URL to point to their comments pages instead, and a decent client would use it transparently (assuming good media types).
All of this is taken for granted and used a lot on the real RESTful space: the HTML Web.
Example: think of posts here on HN. One thing a specific media format would include is a "reply" link, but on hellbanned posts that link would absent, so that state would be inaccessible to clients.
Or say you've used comments on your blog, so each post has a link to the list of comments about it. Now you switch to Disqus, and so you could change the URL to point to their comments pages instead, and a decent client would use it transparently (assuming good media types).
All of this is taken for granted and used a lot on the real RESTful space: the HTML Web.