[uf-rest] RE: Singular and plurals in URLs

[Logan, Patrick D]

> http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/urls

Is one convention for collections of things, all with URLs. And then...

> The Simply Restful plugin for Rails has gone with...
> /people
> /people/1
> ...we get a single URL hierarchy, which is hackable (remove the /
> 1 to get the index).

Which is fine until you want the same entity to show up in different
collections, etc.

Why not conform to the Atom Publishing Protocol for as much of this as
possible? The hypertext documents tell you the locations of collections
and entities. Relying on conventions is fine, but constructing new URLs
from other URLs may not be as maintainable as the convention of relying
on specific links in the documents themselves.

Introspection documents lead to collections, which lead to entities, but
the URLs do not have to be organized in a specific hierarchy.

I've not used any of these solutions in any significant way, but I fear
a strict hierarchy, having run into problems with them in the past. It
seems the point of hypertext to provide flexibility at runtime.

-Patrick