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

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

On Jun 13, 2006, at 3:22 PM, David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:
>> 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.
>
> For machine-parsing, introspection documents and links are probably  
> fine. For humans, less so. Simply Restful is attempting to make the  
> same URLs usable by many different clients. Humans, machines, XML,  
> HTML, etc.
>
> But it would certainly be nice to have both.

Right.  Having a universal convention is a *great* thing to have, for  
humans, but it isn't sufficient.   There *also* needs to be a way to - 
discover- which URLs to use for different operations.  Fortunately,  
most of the time, Rails does a pretty good job of providing such  
navigation hints (since they're needed for human navigation, after  
all).  We might want to agree on a better way to label them, though:

http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/description

Oddly, the one place they're missing is where *I* would find them  
most useful: the home page.  AFAIK, the default Rails app doesn't  
provide a trivial way to discover the different Model objects (and  
corresponding URL hierarchy).

Is that structurally disallowed, David, or something we could/should  
submit a patch for?  It can't be because you don't want dynamic  
content there, since in Rails 1.0 it now has a "statistics" field.    
Why not a similar field for "known models"?

-- Ernie P.