Re: Rolled up Feedback on draft-gregorio-uritemplate-00

On Nov 9, 2006, at 3:19 PM, Joe Gregorio wrote:
> On 11/9/06, Marc Hadley <Marc.Hadley@sun.com> wrote:
>> I also got some feedback on the users@wadl.dev.java.net mailing list
>> that the spec should require at least one reserved character between
>> template variables since, in the general case, its impossible to work
>> out the values of the template variables after substitution. E.g.
>> given the template
>>
>> http://example.com/{foo}{bar}
>>
>> and the URI
>>
>> http://example.com/xyzzy
>>
>> you can't tell what the values of foo and bar are.
>
> I didn't think that was a use case. I have been operating
> under the assumption that we were covering
> URI Template -> URI, but not the other direction.

It isn't a use case. In general, it is just a bad idea.

Templates should be allowing an owner to tell the client how to
construct a URI.  Trying to go the other way means the client is
attempting to understand the URI by searching for things that
look like metadata.  That is a well-known bad idea, violating
several findings and Web design notes.

....Roy