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The client is the web browser. Firefox can be built entirely without any knowledge of what hacker news is, and you can still browse hacker news on it.
by a_cardboard_box 3y ago
The client is the web browser. Firefox can be built entirely without any knowledge of what hacker news is, and you can still browse hacker news on it.
- kbenson 3y agoI think you're providing evidence for their point? HN isn't exactly useful without a person to browse it. "A generic understanding of hypermedia" is easy to say, but may be much more complex in reality to encode into a set of rules that a program knows to follow. And if we're going to compare "a REST client" as purely the requestor and not the interpreter of the data to something that does JSON RPC calls or graphql, which is often basically REST+, I'm not sure there's any real difference.
- whstl 3y agoHacker News is very useful to Googlebot, and it gets crawled by it every day. It is also useful for people programming Selenium etc to automate using it to collect data. Conversely, an API is not useful without a human or something automated to use it. The point of REST/HATEOAS is not to have arbitrary random APIs that can be magically discovered by a random magic application. There must be some agreements and standards there. OData, GData and AtomPub are good examples of APIs that follow HATEOAS, if you want something that's not HTML+browser.
- yellowapple 3y ago> HN isn't exactly useful without a person to browse it. Is any software useful without someone, you know, using it?