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Comment by prodigal_erik | Hacker News Reader

If anything, this is understating the problem that authors just aren't doing the design work to provide addressable, reusable resources to the rest of the world. They either haven't noticed or don't care that siloed javascript apps are destroying the web.

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I think both can coexist. WebSockets, common comet long poll, and even the "internal" AJAX APIs of web applications are one thing, addressable URIs to resources another.

E.g. Gmail has history navigation and bookmarkable URIs for emails, but no such thing for chat or other page state, which is totally fine.

REST with its addressable resources has clear advantages over RPC style apps for many applications, it won't go away. Bookmarks, navigation, the overall simplicity.

My experience tells me that WebSockets will absolutely dominate in web apps using private API's. They're just so much easier to work with, and superior performance. But REST will still be the preferred way to build public API's because Websockets require a certain amount of resource per user that you probably don't want in a public API.

The web was never a set of "addressable, reusable resources".

Would you please explain? What is the web, in your view, if not that?

I dispute the existence of "resources" in the abstract sense people are trying to achieve with respect to REST. The web is just a collection of stuff with ephemeral links to go from thing to thing. Obviously, these could be called "resources", but not in the coherent sense implied by REST.

Then what is the web?

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