Re: A URL API

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 11:56 PM, Adam Barth <w3c@adambarth.com> wrote:
> Ok.  I'm sold on having an API for constructing query parameters.
> Thoughts on what it should look like?  Here's what jQuery does:
>
> http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.get/
>
> Essentially, you supply a JSON object containing the parameters.  They
> also have some magical syntax for specifying multiple instances of the
> same parameter name.  I like the easy of supplying a JSON object, but
> I'm not in love with the magical syntax.  An alternative is to use two
> APIs, like we current have for reading the parameter values.

jQuery's syntax isn't magical - the example they give using the query
param name of 'choices[]' is doing that because PHP requires a [] at
the end of the query param name to signal it that you want multiple
values.  It's opaque, though - you could just as easily have left off
the '[]' and it would have worked the same.

The switch is just whether you pass an array or a string (maybe they
support numbers too?).

I recommend the method be called append*, so you can use it both for
first sets and later additions (this is particularly useful if you're
just looping through some data).  This obviously would then need a
clear functionality as well.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 21 September 2010 16:54:25 UTC