Re: Filters as views (ISSUE-45)

On 2016-02-15 10:05, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
>> I still feel it would be better not to add a general-purpose URL syntax
>> description language to Hydra, but rather have a way to say that the
>> client may formulate requests following a well-known, publicly specified
>> query syntax:
>
>> "urlSyntax": ... one of TPF, opensearch, odata ...
>
> Then we lose the self-descriptiveness and we're back to square one.
>

No, we're not. Hydra already provides more API description facilities 
than any other hypermedia media type I know.

> The whole reason that I am using Hydra for TPF
> is that I don't want to say to clients "just do the TPF thing".
> I want a hypermedia control that says
> "you can filter the collection by subject, predicate, object".
>
>> That way, we do not have to explain the URL
>> syntax to the machine on a case-by-case basis
>
> Yes we do; and even worse, we only explain it in prose, not for machines.
>

But you will never be able to describe all hypermedia operations/links 
in a machine-readable manner. At least not in the sense that machines 
can "understand" it. However there's great value in machine-readability 
where all of the API metadata is processed at runtime.

This is what hypermedia is all about and not about making the API client 
understand what it means to perform an operation, which reserves a seat 
at a concert. The latter is on the verge of artificial intelligence, 
which is a dead end for Hydra as far as I'm concerned.

Received on Monday, 15 February 2016 19:54:27 UTC