markup forms. Rough example:

<form class="vcard">
    <fieldset class="n">
      <input class="given-name" />
      <input clas"family-name" />
     </fieldset>
</form>

Something like that.

Yes, something like that. To be precise, exactly this is what I had in mind. I just didn't know <fieldset> Thanks for that.

Also, html forms could be useful for documenting the parameters
available on rest resources. Mixed with microformats, as above, this
could be a very useful way to document a rest api. It would cover
much the same territory as WADL, but in a web-native way which can be
very useful to developers, as the forms are a functional sandbox.

I couldn't have said it better :-) Except that the form *is* the service interface, not just a sandbox.

In that context, "lo-rest" is service-oriented, "high-rest" is resource-oriented. Yes?

That just leaves me with the question of how to encode the expected result (i.e. the content of the resulting POST). Two things come to my mind:
  1. Encode it within the form
  2. Force the form target to be different and do a get on it
I prefer 1. for various reasons, but I am open for suggestions on how this encoding might look like.

It should contain:
  • A human readable description of the service
  • A parsable description of the content expected, possibly pointing to XMDPs
The second point brings up two questions:
  1. Microformats solve the problem of parsing the content within html, but how to identitfy (address) it? We can not safely assume designers to include ID-attributes, can we? XPath? HTML-Anchors?
  2. From there to something like relax-ng is not very far. Do we need to go there?
Just some ideas, I wish I had time to flesh them out more.

For once, I can live with that, as this will hopefully turn into a chapter of my dissertation ;-)

Thanks for all the help!
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