On Jun 13, 2006, at 3:22 PM, David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:
I've not used any of these solutions in any significant way, but I
fear
a strict hierarchy, having run into problems with them in the
past. It
seems the point of hypertext to provide flexibility at runtime.
For machine-parsing, introspection documents and links are probably
fine. For humans, less so. Simply Restful is attempting to make the
same URLs usable by many different clients. Humans, machines, XML,
HTML, etc.
But it would certainly be nice to have both.
Right. Having a universal convention is a *great* thing to have, for
humans, but it isn't sufficient. There *also* needs to be a way to -
discover- which URLs to use for different operations. Fortunately,
most of the time, Rails does a pretty good job of providing such
navigation hints (since they're needed for human navigation, after
all). We might want to agree on a better way to label them, though:
http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/description
Oddly, the one place they're missing is where *I* would find them
most useful: the home page. AFAIK, the default Rails app doesn't
provide a trivial way to discover the different Model objects (and
corresponding URL hierarchy).
Is that structurally disallowed, David, or something we could/should
submit a patch for? It can't be because you don't want dynamic
content there, since in Rails 1.0 it now has a "statistics" field.
Why not a similar field for "known models"?
-- Ernie P.
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