developing APIs with HTML

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

I feel like the markup conversations are reawakening a bit.  Some of 
them are familiar, but I keep seeing new twists in them.

Jon Moore gave a talk last November emphasizing the importance of 
hypermedia in hypermedia APIs.   The talk is more a telling of history 
to leave us with a challenge than a demonstration of API creation in 
HTML, but it's well-worth pondering.  (Talking with Jon Moore, it's 
clear that he has actually written, and worked with groups writing, 
successful APIs with HTML.)

Hypermedia conversation has a way of making me nostalgic for XLink.  I 
can't quite jump to building hypertext affordances into XML itself, but 
this talk makes me think it's a better idea than I used to think.

"A story of a wondrous place..." (Start here if you want the full 
storytelling.)

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UG7u7ARTfM#t=00m50s>

"various flavors of JSON, one flavor for each company that was building 
an API on top of it, and the fall was complete." (11:59)

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UG7u7ARTfM#t=11m59s>

"HTML... still the most affordance-rich expressive language for 
dynamically describing state machine transitions.  And everyone still 
understands it.... perhaps more easily than they can read API 
documentation.  But most importantly, when you develop an API with HTML, 
it induces a state machine-oriented way of thinking.

When people develop in HTML, they think of web sites, and those are 
inherently state machine and use case oriented." (13:08)

Bonus: Mike Amundsen on reusable APIs:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UG7u7ARTfM#t=18m28s>

There's lots more there too.  It's quite a panel!

Thanks,
--
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/