On 3/21/06, Mark Nottingham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 2006/03/20, at 12:20 PM, Ryan King wrote: > > > 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. > > Is that really the case? A form seems almost like a choreography to > me (although I'm fairly ignorant of that world); i.e., it tells you > how to do one task, rather than document the whole interface. > > E.g., if I have a resource that accepts GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, > the form is probably only going to tickle one of those methods... You > could put together a set of forms that covered all of the ground, of > course, but for some tasks, that's pretty clunky.
Let me try this one. Scenario 1: HTML form provides description of the url-encoded representation of the resource. Here we have a resource with two (at least) representations: text/html and application/x-www-url-encoded. In this case, HTML form acts as the descriptor of a resource and helps client to build POST/PUT queries, and even parse GET queries, assuming that we can do a GET for url-encoded representation (Why? that's a different question). DELETE doesn't benefit from the form, but neither it needs to. In HTML4, the only valid method of the form is "POST", but WebForms2 gives us "PUT". Scenario 2: HTML form provides description of query, available for the resource (query builder) In this scenario, the form is not really part of REST. It's just a way to specify options for modifying (querying) a resource. Naturally, this one can only be used in conjunction with "GET" method. Both scenarios can be applied simultaneously to the same resource: one form is a representation descriptor, the other is the query builder. :DG< _______________________________________________ microformats-rest mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-rest
