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0 pointssimonbarker872y ago0 comments

How so? (no snark, genuine)

Your frontend makes a request to your server, the expectation is that will respond with html.

If you have other services you need to bring in to the mix that responds with JSON then make the request to them from your server, have that parse the JSON in to HTML (most likely some kind of templating system like handlebars) and then send that back to your frontend as html for htmx to handle.

Or am I missing something?

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withinboredom2y ago

Dear god. Have we forgotten about the ACCEPT header? If you get a request with ACCEPT application/json, return json. If you get one with text/html, return html.

simonw2y ago

I don't think using the accept header is a good idea.

The main reason is that it doesn't necessarily play well with proxies. Most notoriously, Vary: Accept is not supported by Cloudflare (with the exception of images). This means it's not safe to use the accept header if your site will ever be backed by Cloudflare, as you could end up returning cached HTML to a JSON client or vice-versa.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/concepts/cache-contr...

My other problem with it is that it's not very discoverable - it can be surprising to interact with an endpoint that varies based on the accept header. It's not commonly used, so many developers are unfamiliar with it.

And even if you do understand it, it's still hard to tell which endpoints support Vary and which don't.

Finally: I like to debug things by copying and pasting URLs around. The Accept header doesn't support that kind of communication - you need to share not just the URL but also the accept header you were using when you saw a specific response.

withinboredom2y ago

I’m not a fan of vendors “not supporting something” as a reason to not use something. Either get a new vendor, put pressure on the vendor, or ignore the feature you want to use.

I personally don’t care about what cloudflare does because I don’t use them.

The rest is RTFM for whatever API you are calling and you usually have to send auth or cookies anyway, so an accept header isn’t that big of a deal.

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bpicolo2y ago

JSON APIs are typically more general. Here, you'll need different endpoints/handling for every flavor of HTML you may show that uses that same dataset. It's not so simple as Accept headers unless you always use exactly the same html, in every context on your site, to represent a "user with ID <foo>"

withinboredom2y ago

Not at all. Post a form submission, send back either the same form with errors displayed, or simply return out-of-band updates to error message divs. You can redirect from the response as well using htmx, so if the form submission is successful, you can redirect to a success page ... or simply update a div with a success message.

If you get a request asking for json, you just return a json with the same thing. Not much changes with API design if you were designing the API well in the first place.

simonbarker87OP2y ago

Not sure if your “Dear god” is negatively targeted at my comment - I’ll assume it’s a general show of exasperation.

How likely is it every API will adhere to that though?

withinboredom2y ago

Yeah, just exasperation. For the longest time, most APIs would return json if you asked for json, or xml if you requested xml. Many older api's still do content negotiation, many gave up because 'xml bad'.

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withinboredom2y ago

Dear god. Have we forgotten about the ACCEPT header? If you get a request with ACCEPT application/json, return json. If you get one with text/html, return html.

simonw2y ago

I don't think using the accept header is a good idea.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/concepts/cache-contr...

And even if you do understand it, it's still hard to tell which endpoints support Vary and which don't.

withinboredom2y ago

I’m not a fan of vendors “not supporting something” as a reason to not use something. Either get a new vendor, put pressure on the vendor, or ignore the feature you want to use.

I personally don’t care about what cloudflare does because I don’t use them.

The rest is RTFM for whatever API you are calling and you usually have to send auth or cookies anyway, so an accept header isn’t that big of a deal.

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bpicolo2y ago

withinboredom2y ago

If you get a request asking for json, you just return a json with the same thing. Not much changes with API design if you were designing the API well in the first place.

simonbarker87OP2y ago

Not sure if your “Dear god” is negatively targeted at my comment - I’ll assume it’s a general show of exasperation.

How likely is it every API will adhere to that though?

withinboredom2y ago

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