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0 pointsjanci3y ago0 comments

> You hit a top level endpoint, and then at that point other endpoints are made manifest, and then the UA/client and the user decide together what the next relevant endpoint is.

That's not how APIs are used. APIs consume and provide data. Raw data is unsuitable to be presented to the user. That's why HTML has so many formatting options. Formatting information is completely missing from APIs.

> Seems to have worked more or less for 30 years.

Yes, worked for good old web. In this sense, true REST is nothing new and even seems backwards. If we try to do REST while keeping data and presentation separate, we will come to something very similar to XML for data + XSLT for formatting. Or XForms. Old ideas all over again.

> I don't understand that, actually. Markup is underrated for data exchange potential these days.

XML/markup does not map well to basic data types in current programming languages. These work with strings, ints, floats and arrays/dictionaries thereof. Not Nodes, Elements and attributes of unknown/variant data types.

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kortex3y ago

> XML/markup does not map well to basic data types in current programming languages. These work with strings, ints, floats and arrays/dictionaries thereof. Not Nodes, Elements and attributes of unknown/variant data types

Exactly.

Arrays are pretty much the most primitive computer data structure (aside from primitives), and the contortions XML must go through to express them is remarkable. So much ceremony, and it can't do a simple list. XML has this core implicit assumption that everything ought to be an object, and I think this was the ultimate death knell for it. You can add complexity to JSON (e.g. JSON-LD) but you can't take the complexity out of XML.

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