A primary
obstacle to adoption is the dearth of ways to represent semantic metadata in hypermedia
at the moment. RDF is gaining currency in this field, but there are still few wellknown
best practices as to how to encode relationships between resources within their
representations.
194 | Chapter 7: REST, Resources, and Web Services

Order #124

Items:

• Office Chair, Medium


• Ergonomic Keyboard

But a request to the same resource with a different URI, at /orders/124.xml, might
result in a more easily machine-readable XML version:


Office Chair, Medium
Ergonomic Keyboard


The JavaScript representation at /orders/124.js might use JSON:
{"order": {
"id": 124,
"items": [
{"id": 1, "href": "/orders/124/items/1",
"description": "Office Chair, Medium"},
{"id": 2, "href": "/orders/124/items/2",
"description": "Ergonomic Keyboard"}]
}}
Changing content types based on URI extensions is nice and easy, and it plays well
with the way we traditionally expect the Web to work. Among other things, it makes
the URIs look like filenames again, and behave somewhat like filesystem paths.


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