Re: [Specifications] How to document forbidden dereferencability (#216)

I think the possible issues you mention exist regardless of profiles and is impossible to do anything about with Hydra. An API can change regardless of the profile. It doesn't even need a profile to change. And since profiles are identified by URI, anyone can create one. We can't control that, not within Hydra or anywhere else.

This has been the case for open-ended extensibility for as long as it has existed. It was like this for XML namespaces, it's the same for RDF where anyone can mint a URI to declare a new term and it's the same with profiles. What we can control is how these extension mechanisms works and then provide some guidance and recommendations on how to develop Hydra profiles and which we officially embrace and not. Other than that, it's all up to the Hydra users to decide.

I hope we can all agree that Hydra Core is the minimum of what a client must understand in order to interoperate with a Hydra-capable API. The profiles just extend Hydra Core, so a client can always fall back to Hydra Core to follow its links and perform its operations in a rudimentary but compliant way. So not understanding a profile is not the end of the world, it's just going to provide a worse user experience.

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Received on Wednesday, 27 May 2020 21:34:24 UTC