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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

You are missing the point of the article. I am not suggesting that people use HTML APIs in place of JSON APIs. I am suggesting that they should use something else for that:

It’s time to admit it: the REST-haters are right. REST does not make for a great raw data-level API architecture, and efforts like GraphQL and RPC-like architectures are likely to end up producing something more usable for complicated data needs.

Rather I am suggesting that the REST-ful architecture can be rescued from API use, using HATEOS and annotated HTML in web applications.

This article took a long time to write and, while I don't expect people to agree with me on the value of REST/HATEOS or the viability of intercooler as a web application library, I do think it is worth taking time to understand my argument.

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The time you spent on this is much appreciated. Everyone is trying to get a handle on the best way to do web development.

I also appreciate people that either (1) buck the SPA/JS trend for the purpose of trying to make the web more accessible, or (2) develop APIs that are at least usable in theory by clients that don't limit accessibility.

However, when you rely on a combination of JS and HTML that isn't accessible and APIs that can't be used easily by non-browser clients, I don't care whether you are trying to adhere to Roy Fielding's vision or not, I can't go for that.

It reminds me a little of Tim Berners Lee pushing for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web with dreams of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL supporting databases and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDF_query_language defining everything. Really smart guy. Really neat idea of how things could have worked. But the real world is not like that, and it isn't filling the needs of today's web developers in a smart, fun, and practical way.

If we're going to "fix" web development, let's just start over.

How about defining data to view/feel/hear and APIs to use in a way that doesn't enforce the method that you use to interact with them? What if webpages were JSON instead, and that JSON could embed definitions of available services? What if all of the web was decentralized so we weren't reliant on anything except the device you used to host this JSON and its services and it was easily scalable across peers that decided to host it?

That's the sort of future I'd be in favor of.

I have returned RDF/N3 from my web services for years. And transformed that data into a Javascript graph of objects on the client with the library available at https://github.com/RubenVerborgh/N3.js.

It is very flexible. Each object has a unique identifier. That identifier is dereferencable as a URL. Each object has a type (because the Semantic Web is all about typing your data, and applying your code on data of a given type). The graph can be traversed in any way I want on the client.

Honestly, this makes things quite simple.

I like the idea behind the semantic web and if everyone had the bandwidth to commit resources to it, it would definitely add additional abilities to the web. But, in my experience, the time spent on adding RDF support wasn't worth the adoption or limited gains in site usage.

What are its usage metrics in your site(s)? Does it appear that there is significant growth in its adoption?

Facebook's has offered RDF for a while. I've not heard of its use outside of academic circles.

RDF has no adoption. JSON is the winner. Let's try to understand why: Because JSON.parse() is instantly available on the client. On the contrary, RDF.parse() (or more precisely N3.parse()) is available on the client only if you use that obscure library I mentionned above. Noone knows the library, so noone uses the N3.parse(). Ok. End of discussion.

Now my own feeling: RDF (and especially its N3 dialect) is the only description language I know of that serializes and deserializes graphs with no specific code, and has a good JS lib for client-side consumption.

JSON (or XML, or any other tree descrption language) requires extra effort whenever you use it to serialize/deserialize/traverse a graph structure. That is why i think they suck. And that's why I prefer RDF/N3.

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