Re: Don't specific media types introduce coupling?

Hi Jan,

Thanks for the very detailed answer, that clears up a lot of the questions I had concerning coupling.

> If you do not do that (write specific media types) but instead use generic ones (application/xml, application/json) you absolutely, 100%, need some out of band coupling somewhere if you want your client to do more than 'parse as xml' or 'parse as json'. And you will, immediately, end up with a non RESTful architecture where out of band contract is owned and changed by the server.

I’m not sure about the latter.
I agree if this out-of-band coupling (say, a description document, maybe machine-processable) is static and has to be precompiled. However, if such a description document can be obtained and interpreted at runtime [1], I’d argue that a RESTful interaction is taking place.

Best,

Ruben

[1] Such as in your work with Thomas at http://ws-rest.org/2011/proc/a3-steiner.pdf

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