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Comment by wtbob | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, URIs shouldn't end in extensions (use content negotiation!), content should be readable without executing code (no JavaScript necessary), content should be available in multiple languages (use content negotiation!), and RESTful interface should offer a simple forms-based interface for testing, &c.

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I've settled for "every article has an URL that looks like a folder" (including trailing slash – that particular debate is pointless), only resources like pictures look like a file with extensions.

That's easy to achieve with all CMSen, but also trivially done with a static website (the web server is configured to use index.html or whatever you like).

> RESTful interface should offer a simple forms-based interface for testing

There are plenty of tools which can serve this need. Why complicate every implementation with duplicative functionality?

Content negotiation for language and format? Not in any human-usable system, please. Sharing a URL then getting content in a different language is incredibly annoying. There may be no alternative for home pages, and using the Accept-Lang header is nicer than using the broken geo system for sure.

But it makes no sense to have a link to a document and get completely different content back based on language. And file extensions are needed since browsers don't expose a way to ask for, say, PDFs or images over HTML.

On the other hand, "extension" is just an interpretation.

Unfortunately not all CDNs respect the Vary:Accept header.

I'm sure it's behind the proliferation of the .format extension to determine response type.

So, a spec that doesn't describe the current state of the web at all and which hosts have found unworkable and over-constraining.

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