[lelanthran]

> All that said there might be some situations where your goal is to query raw/tabular data from the client. If that's your application then APIs that enable that can make sense. But most applications are not that.

IME, the majority of responses sent to the client is tabular data hammered into a JSON tree.

If you generalise all your response to tabular data, that lets you return scalar values (a table of exactly one row and one column), arrays (a table of exactly one row with multiple columns) or actual tables (a table of multiple rows with multiple columns).

The problem comes in when some of the values within those cells are trees themselves, but I suspect that can be solved by having a response contain multiple tables, with pointer-chasing on the client side reconstructing the trees within cells using the other tables in the response.

That would still leave the 1% of responses that actually are trees, though.