[madhadron]

> the simultaneous presentation of information and controls such that the information becomes the affordance through which the user (or automaton) obtains choices and selects actions

What's unclear or abstract about that? To choose an action, the agent must know what actions are available and how to call them. Whatever presents that information to the agent is the affordance. Fielding says that in hyptertext, you get that as part of the actual content as opposed to via documentation or some other channel.

> I challenge anyone to transform something as simple as "hypertext is text with links to other text in it" into a more convoluted and unnecessarily abstracted definition as the above.

Because that's not what it is, in general. See Xanadu for an example of vastly more general kinds of linkages than references.

[lucideer]

> Because that's not what it is, in general. See Xanadu for an example of vastly more general kinds of linkages than references.

The purpose of very abstract, generalised, academic (also legal) language is to attempt to achieve perfect technical correctness in description. Unfortunately this usually comes at the cost of understanding.

"Text with links to other text" obviously won't include 100.000% of applications conforming to RESTfulness, but it does describe what RESTfulness intends far better and more accessibly than a convoluted explanation, which very effectively serves the purpose of informing people calling RPC REST that it is not in fact REST (for example). It also gives a broad audience a general direction to work toward if they intend to use REST (or a reasonable argument not to use it if it's not what they feel they need).

The accessible explanation serves an actual practical purpose, the pedantic explanation has no actual benefit. The fact that you had to reference a project as esoteric and dead-end as Xanadu is testament to this.

[SilasX]

>What's unclear or abstract about that? To choose an action, the agent must know what actions are available and how to call them. Whatever presents that information to the agent is the affordance. Fielding says that in hyptertext, you get that as part of the actual content as opposed to via documentation or some other channel.

But then that would be wrong. You had to know, through documentation and other out-of-band education, what you’re supposed to do with these `<a href=...` things. Ditto for any of the other options a page might present.

When you first used the web, you didn’t know what href meant. You had to read some instructions, or depend on UX designers’ decision to graphically represent a-tags in a way that suggests clickability and followability. That’s already outside his REST model.

Fielding is not being clear on how REST’s assumptions about “what you already know out-of-band” differ from other models.