Re: purpose and scope (was: Pagination (ISSUE-42))

Ruben,

Thanks for your link to your research. I'm not going to analyse it too
deeply and I certainly don't want to offend, but just say application user
interfaces require design to be effective and usable for a user audience.
Any affordance in a modern application needs to be designed in and holistic
consideration given to how it integrates with other affordances.  I don't
see a paradox, except when you take the view that hypermedia is the engine
of application state and that some functionality can be achieved from that
representation by transitioning on an edge vendor-ed by the resource.  But
the problem is that you're down in the weeds, and there is no way to
assimilate those potentials into a meaningful whole without them being
designed a-priori.  Thats why we have people designing applications and
user interfaces and why companies like Apple have been successful designing
things the masses can use effectively. Auto assembly of pragmatic user
interfaces from hypermedia is probably not a viable pursuit, a bit like
discovering sequences of music notes and trying to string them together is
hardly going to make a symphony anyone will want to hear.


On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 6:23 PM, Ruben Verborgh <ruben.verborgh@ugent.be>
wrote:

> Hi Andrew,
>
> > I also believe that Roy Fieldings "Hypermedia is the engine of
> application state" has limited applicability to contemporary web
> applications.
>
> “Hypermedia as the engine” only works within a single application.
> I've discussed this affordance paradox before [1].
>
> > It is absurd to think the api endpoint for twitter can somehow know the
> full application context
>
> We don't think that.
> What we aim to do with the Hydra Core Vocabulary is to provide an
> interoperable set of hypermedia controls so that at least the application
> state transitions of a single application can be expressed uniformly. It's
> the machine-interpretable version of <a> and <form>, where machines can
> also interpret what will happen before they follow the links or submit the
> forms. And like on the human Web, there are never links and forms to
> everything.
>
> > I want MY applications to work at a superior level to what the Hydra
> console or any generic client provides and I am sure everyone else here
> does too since you can't really say 'go use the hydra console' to a user as
> your front end.
>
> The Console just proves that your application can be consumed by generic
> clients. That is something new. Most existing APIs require custom clients.
> Enabling generic clients is a major goal of Hydra.
>
> Best,
>
> Ruben
>
> [1] http://ruben.verborgh.org/phd/ruben-verborgh-phd.pdf#page=79