Key WOA Concepts

Nick Gall clarifies a few key concepts of web architecture around the URI:

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On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 9:09 AM, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
> I think that there are two distinct uses of URIs. There are URIs that are never
> intended to be typed by people (or at least don't need to be), and there are
> URIs that only people will type.

I couldn't disagree more strongly. We should be doing everything in our power to eliminate the distinction between human understandable and machine understandable interfaces. Thus suggesting URIs for humans be different from URIs for machines is a step in the wrong direction.

There are three important reasons to make interfaces for humans and machines as similar as possible:

Debugging: you never know when a person needs to look under the covers to see what's going wrong. Why do you think the Internet and Web emphasize ASCII text-based protocols even though they are far less efficient than binary and will rarely be seen by most people

"Show source": human readable interfaces generally and human readable URLs specifically make it easier for developers (and even occasional scripters like me) to learn from one another

Serendipity: TBL and RTF emphasize that the web is designed/engineering for serendipity. Thus you never know (and shouldn't try to guess) which URIs people will or won't want to use directly.

Our goal should be to minimize the distance between UI and API. Assuming that people will see and use all URIs is a big step in that direction.
-- Nick

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Spot on, Nick! I love the notion of 'minimizing the distance between UI and API'...

See: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/message/10245