[wwweston]

> What's the point? This would lead to your API being comprised of blocks of HTML which are probably only useable for one product.

Only usable for one product? There aren't many platforms without UI layers that have some kind of component for rendering/presenting HTML these days. But even for those that don't:

> Why not just use REST + JSON?

Markup is as much a data-exchange format as JSON is. If you're writing/generating it well, anyway.

I'm not saying never use JSON (I have and do). I am saying it's a little weird, though, that we've somehow got to the point where anyone who's commenting on this discussion has forgotten that markup has done and can do the job JSON does, or that we're at a place where as an industry it seems weird or potentially an interop problem to serve markup instead.

[ashark]

Plus, unless I'm missing something, the typical case is just:

    if accept==html then return html(template, data)
    else return json(data)

Which is sure as hell less work than setting up React/Angular and a bunch of other junk on your HTML frontend to consume JSON and turn it into HTML in the browser. Probably higher performance, too, since JSON-consuming HTML frontends in the wild don't seem to exhibit (putting it mildly) the performance improvements that AJAX originally promised—then again, that X was XML (and remember XHTML? I, for one, really liked it) so it's not necessarily AJAX's fault that we've decided to rube-goldberg up the web the way we have.