Re: Don't specific media types introduce coupling?

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Ruben Verborgh <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
>> Then you don't need to call it a "description document" since it's
>> just another resource with links that is part of your application.
>
> Of course, this would just be another linked resource (maybe even rel=describedby).
> But the peculiarity of this resource would be that it enables clients to understand how to act upon another document with a generic media type, thereby avoiding the need to use specific media types while keeping the benefits of specific semantics.
>

You can convey your application's semantics via the documentation of
your link relations. If you're following the Web Linking spec then
your app specific link relations should be URIs. If you make those
link relation URIs ones you control then you can expose documentation
at each one describing the semantics of the target resource and the
possible transitions over the link - this documentation can be both
human readable (html) and/or machine readable (some horrible schema
thing or form or whatever).

Cheers,
M