[uf-discuss] Re: [uf-rest] Microformats for <form> ?

[Mark Rickerby]

> Why is it better to delay the knowledge of response document details
> to execution time (during a response is returned)? This looks like
> what a form does on purpose.. ;-)

Because there is a powerful component of human awareness at work here.

The visible web evolves due to a process of "manual introspection",
also known as "view source", and I'm not sure how realistic it is to
automate this, except in the most simple of cases.

> Taking an example in [2], we can provide a form to describe the
> "Arguements" section, but not "Example Response" section. So, should
> we ommit that, or need an extra W*DL document to describe the
> response?

You could do this:

<form>
     <fieldset class="parameters">
         <label for="text" class="optional">Tags</label>: <input
type="text" name="tags" />
     </fieldset>
    <div class="action">
         <input type="submit" value="Get Tags"/>
    </div>
    <div class="response">
      <p>This service returns a <var class="returns">text/html</var>
document containing
      a <var class="format">XOXO</var> list of <var
class="format">xFolk</var> entries.</p>
      <p>See also:</p>
      <ul>
        <li><a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/xoxo" rel="help">XOXO</a></li>
        <li><a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/xfolk"
rel="help">xFolk</a></li>
      </ul>
    </div>
</form>

My thoughts are that it's important to keep everything as human
readable as possible. Otherwise, tower of babel not withstanding, what
is the point in using XHTML for dsecribing the service response, when
there are already WSDL and AtomPub alternatives focused specifically
on solving this problem?

Regards,
Mark