[cryptonector]

Thanks, I appreciate the detailed response.

> So, all in all, I kind of agree with you on the pointlessness of REST purity when it comes to general purpose APIs, but disagree in that I think you can profitably split your application API (hypermedia) from your automation API (JSON) and get the best of both worlds, and not duplicate code too much if you have a proper model layer.

I've yet to see what I proposed, so I've no idea how it would work out. Given the current state of the world I think devs will continue to write JS-dependent SPAs that use JSON APIs. Grandstanding about the meaning of REST is not going to change that.

[recursivedoubts]

I've built apps w/ hypermedia APIs & JSON APIs for automation, which is great because the JSON API can stay stable and not get dragged around by changes in your application.

As far as the future, we'll see. htmx (and other hypermedia-oriented libraries, like unpoly, hotwire, data-star, etc) is getting some traction, but I think you are probably correct that fixed-format JSON APIs talking to react front-ends is going to be the most common approach for the foreseeable future.

[cryptonector]

If you want JS-lesness and HATEOASnes then maybe if we had an automatic way to go from structured data to HTML... :)

[recursivedoubts]

most structured-data to UI systems I have seen produce pretty bad, generic user interfaces

the innovation of hypermedia was mixing presentation information w/control information (hypermedia controls) to produce a user interface (distributed control information, in the case of the web)

i think that's an interesting and crucial aspect of the REST network architecture

[cryptonector]

What I have in mind is something like this:

1) you write your web page in HTML

2) where you fetch data from a server and would normally use JS to render it you'd instead have an HTML attribute naming the "schema" to use to hydrate the data into HTML which would happen automatically, with the hydrated HTML incorporated into the page at some named location.

The schema would be something like XSLT/XPath, but perhaps simpler, and it would support addressing JSON/CBOR data.

[recursivedoubts]

this sounds like client side templating to me (some annotated HTML that is "hydrated" from a server) but attached directly to a JSON api rather than having a reactive model

if you have a schema then you are breaking the uniform interface of REST: the big idea with REST is that the client (that is, the browser) doesn't know or care what a given end point returns structurally: it just knows that it's hypermedia and it can render the content and all the hypermedia controls in that content to the user

the necessity of a schema means you are coupling your client and server in a manner that REST (in the traditional sense) doesn't. See https://htmx.org/essays/hateoas

REST (original sense) does couple your responses to your UI, however, in that your responses are your UI, see https://htmx.org/essays/two-approaches-to-decoupling/

I may be misunderstanding what you are proposing, but I do strongly agree w/Fielding (https://ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_st...) that the uniform interface of REST is its most distinguishing feature, and the necessity of a shared schema between client and server indicates that it is not a property of the proposed system.

[cryptonector]

> if you have a schema then you are breaking the uniform interface of REST: the big idea with REST is that the client (that is, the browser) doesn't know or care what a given end point returns structurally: it just knows that it's hypermedia and it can render the content and all the hypermedia controls in that content to the user

This doesn't follow. Why is rendering one thing that consists of one document versus another thing that consists of two documents so different that one is RESTful and the other is not?

> this sounds like client side templating to me (some annotated HTML that is "hydrated" from a server) but attached directly to a JSON api rather than having a reactive model

I wouldn't call it templating. It resembles more a stylesheet -- that's why I referenced XSLT/XPath. Browsers already know how to apply XSLT even -- is that unRESTful?

> the necessity of a schema means you are coupling your client and server in a manner that REST (in the traditional sense) doesn't. See https://htmx.org/essays/hateoas

Nonsense. The schema is sent by the server like any other page. Splitting a thing into two pieces, one metadata and one data, is not "coupling [the] client and server", it's not coupling anything. It's a compression technique of sorts, and mainly one that allows one to reuse API end-points in the UI.

EDIT: Sending the data and the instructions for how to present it separately is no more non-RESTful than using CSS and XML namespaces and Schema and XSLT are.

I think you're twisting REST into pretzels.

> REST (original sense) does couple your responses to your UI, however, in that your responses are your UI, see https://htmx.org/essays/two-approaches-to-decoupling/

How is one response RESTful and two responses not RESTful when the user-agent performs the two requests from a loaded page?

> I may be misunderstanding what you are proposing, but I do strongly agree w/Fielding (https://ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_st...) that the uniform interface of REST is its most distinguishing feature, and the necessity of a shared schema between client and server indicates that it is not a property of the proposed system.

You don't have to link to Fielding's dissertation. That comes across as an appeal to authority.