Re: URI Templates: done or dead?

Most of my use cases are for doing things like putting them into  
headers and content so that people can build new/dynamic protocols for  
machines with them. Making them more friendly for humans to read is a  
side effect; what I'm interested in is making them easier/more  
intuitive for humans to *mint*, because they'll usually be the ones  
writing them (just as with HTML, although I think the collective crowd  
of authors will be a bit more technical, but only a bit).

My observation is that for those protocol-building cases, it's usually  
a light integration; someone needs to create a URI with a particular  
piece of data in it, and they don't want to constrain its form, so  
they need a template. They don't need list data or complex operators,  
or if they do, they can specify some pre-processing.

I don't disagree that there may be a place for "whiteboardable"  
templates, but it's a secondary use case for me.

Cheers,



On 16/09/2008, at 4:26 AM, Mike Schinkel wrote:

> Roy gave me his comments in response to my fervent advocacy for URI
> Templates to be optimized for humans. Mark it sounds like you have a  
> similar
> position to mine which is there is a strong needs for a very human  
> friendly
> URI Template specification. I envision many uses for URI Templates in
> Content Management Systems and Application Frameworks but I think Roy
> envisions using them in Apache, routers, proxies, etc.  
> Unfortunately, I
> don't think any URI template specification will come to a resolution  
> as long
> as there are those competing and evidently non-compatible objectives.


--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Monday, 15 September 2008 20:42:54 UTC