- From: Ruben Verborgh <ruben.verborgh@ugent.be>
- Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 21:13:59 +0100
- To: Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
- Cc: public-hydra@w3.org
Hi Melvin,
> Thanks Ruben. How about discovery. Does hydra tell you *where* to find an API, from a website root?
Hypermedia. Just follow a link.
And if you ask me, the website *is* the API :-)
It's time we stop treating humans and machines so differently;
give machines the right hypermedia controls, and they can use the website/API.
> VOID does this as /.well-known/void is registered already with IANA
I've never understood the need for .well-known.
Humans don't need it, right?
We land on a random page and just follow links to get where we want.
The same can work for machines.
> Is there any equivalent in hydra?
A machine starts with a URL of some resource in the API.
It GETs a machine-readable representation of that resource.
Inside that resource, there will be links, which a machine can follow.
You could also be very explicit and add
</docs/> a ApiDocumentation.
But honestly, I think a link or form works better.
If you want to see such a hypermedia API at work,
take a look at http://data.linkeddatafragments.org/dbpedia2014?predicate=dc%3Arights.
This is a random resources from a hypermedia API.
Try to get a representation both with your browser and with curl.
You'll see that in all cases, you'll get links to reach all of the API.
Best,
Ruben
Received on Wednesday, 29 October 2014 20:14:33 UTC