The lie of the API

Dear all,

Even though people often perceive it as a technical artefact,
REST/hypermedia APIs offer tangible benefits that go beyond the technical aspects.

For instance, in the cultural heritage sector, much money is being spent on sustainable access.
Furthermore, it is one of the areas where uniform identification is of utmost importance.
So the fact that a single URL can identify the same resource across systems, 
regardless of representation, is crucial (but often not implemented as such).

Unfortunately, the two leading projects DPLA and Europeana got their API design wrong.
The API they offer for human visitors is distinct from the machine API.
As such, it is impossible to share identifiers between different systems.
Furthermore, the incorporation of API keys in URLs of JSON representations
makes it impossible to link to a machine-accessible version of a resource.

I've written a high-level blog post about these problems:
http://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2013/11/29/the-lie-of-the-api/
If somebody doubts whether a REST API is a good idea, this could be a great starting point.

Cheers,

Ruben