Hi Mark,
while going through the archives I cam across a posting by Paul
Downey that IMHO contains a spot-on question regarding what might go
into a RESTful description language. Unfortunately, you never seemed
to provide your opinion. Here is the critical part; It would be great
if you could post your opinion.
Paul asked[1] Mark:
<quote>
Would you be happy if a description language didn't use
the word 'operation' but, say 'pattern' or 'task' and gave those
patterns non-symbolic names, e.g. 'add a link' rather
than 'addLink'?
Or are you heading towards having nothing more than a list of the
resources available, and an assumption that all the HTTP verbs
can be applied to each resource? If so, that's less than the
current simple HTTP API publishers [delicious, flickr,..] already
provide in their
English descriptions.
</quote>
IMHO, REST mandates the "less than the simple HTTP API publishers
already provide" because it introduces sort of a hidden contract and
breaks HTTPs API uniformity.
Jan
[1]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-http-desc/2005Jun/
0072.html
