Hi David,
On Nov 10, 2005, at 6:14 AM, David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:
One problem with the scheme defined by Donald. It doesn't separate
viewing an entity and editing it. So for now, I have edit still
happening at person/1/edit, person/1 is showing, and person is the
new form. Any thoughts on how to make the show/edit split happen
more gracefully?
Also, it makes more sense to have the edit state be the postback
than the show stage. Such that its the edit action that shares both
showing the form and updating, not the show action.
I agree. I've been wrestling with this question for a while, and my
suspicion is that there is a general problem of REST assuming there
is only a *single* server-side representation of a resource, e.g.:
http://host/base/person/1
This is tolerable in an XMLish world where you don't care about human
readability and discovery, but not for browser-loving RESTifarians
like us. :-)
I believe that the "right" solution in an XHTML-ish ("REX") world is
to explicitly allow URL suffixes for alternate representations.
Something like:
;http://host/base/person/1/@table :return entity as a <table> row
(XOXT)
<tr><th scope="col"><abbr title="fn">Full (Formatted) Name</abbr></
td>...</tr>
<tr id="person.1"><td class="fn">Ernie Prabhakar</td>...</tr>
;http://host/base/person/1/@ol :return entity as an indexed list (XOXO)
<ol id="person.1" class="xoxo">
<li class="fn">Ernie Prabhakar</li>
...
</ol>
;http://host/base/person/1/@dl :return entity as a keyed dictionary
(XOXO)
<dl id="person.1" class="xoxo" >
<dt><abbr title="fn">Full Name:</abbr></dt><dd class="fn">Ernie
Prabhakar</dd>
...
</dl>
;http://host/base/person/1/@form :return entity as a POSTable form
<dl id="person.1" class="xoxo" >
<dt><label for="person.1.fn"><abbr title="fn">Full (Formatted)
Name</abbr></label></dt>
<dd><input class="fn" type="text" id="person.1.fn" value="Ernie
Prabhakar"/></dd>
...
</dl>
With presumably one of these as the default (no suffix) representation.
The idea is to:
* extend REST to allow multiple server-side representations
* focus on structure ("form") not actions ("edit")
* make it easy to incorporate partials via AHAH with appropriate
structure
* avoid the need to tweak data templates; use CSS to format the
result instead
At least, that's my theory. Thoughts?
http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/rails#URL_Suffix_Proposal
-- Ernie P.
------------
Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. <drernie at opendarwin.org>
Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/
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