Re: Don't specific media types introduce coupling?

Ruben,

You could implement a Maze using HTML: all the client would need to know is
how to follow hyperlinks to navigate the maze like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure.

Regards,
Alan Dean


On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Ruben Verborgh <[email protected]>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> It’s an often-discussed topic that continues to puzzle me:
> self-descriptiveness is encouraged to reduce coupling, but how specific
> can we describe without introducing coupling?
> And specifically: to what extent could “self-describing” formats such as
> RDF help out here?
>
> Let me borrow the Maze+XML example used in a previous discussion [1].
> So the problem is: a server exposes a maze, a client needs to be able to
> navigate through it.
> Basically, there are two options:
> 1) Use a generic format (such as JSON) and explain separately what the
> different fields mean.
> 2) Use a specific format (such as Maze+XML); no need to explain,
> everything is in the media type.
>
> At first, it seems like the second solution minimizes the amount of
> out-of-band information, as solution 1 involves a separate explanation
> document (which might or might not be expressed in a machine-processable
> way). But if you think about it, solution 2 has the exact same amount of
> out-of-band information, only this time it has moved to the interpretation
> of the media type’s specification. In both cases, the client needs to be
> adapted specifically to interact with the media type. And how decoupled is
> it when client and server are constrained to a specific message format?
>
> Things _could_ be different with a self-describing format, as this might
> overcome the need for specific media types. So here’s another situation:
> 3) Use a self-describing format (such as RDF); no need to explain, and the
> client can work this out by itself.
> (Although I’m being slightly overoptimistic about RDF now.) The idea would
> be that the client can interpret the representation as being a maze, and
> continue to use it that way.
>
> My basic question is thus: do specific media types really reduce coupling,
> and if not, what does?
>
> Best,
>
> Ruben
>
> [1]
> https://groups.google.com/d/topic/hypermedia-web/LdKfi47QCxw/discussion
>
>
>
>
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