Re: Studies on the quality of URI Templates

Hi Sarven,

Actually seems like a question for the Web API community.

> Any (longitudinal) study out there on the quality of URI Templates? [*]

I don't think the quality of a URI template is measurable.

URI templates consist, broadly speaking, in two cases:
1) on the server, which uses it to generate IRIs for resources
2) on forms in hypermedia resources, so clients can generate IRIs

A third cases would be inside of API documentation,
but then we're not talking about REST APIs
(and even then, there's not a lot to measure about the templates).

In cases 1 and 2, there's nothing to measure about URI templates.
One could check if the resulting URIs remain accessible and constant,
but that's about it.
The template itself is free to change at any point
and the client should never notice if it is hypermedia-driven.

In case 3, being constant (within an API version) is necessary.

> eg authority's documentation on their URI Templates

That's not a quality attribute of the template itself.

> evaluation, usage, usefulness etc., or
> consumer's documentation/experience on the publisher's URI Templates.

Well, either a template works or it doesn't.

Best,

Ruben

Received on Monday, 22 May 2017 10:08:45 UTC