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

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi Hagen et al,

On Mar 20, 2006, at 12:20 PM, Ryan King wrote:
> There's actually a lot of potential here. I remember some of us  
> talked about this stuff f2f when Dimitri was in the Bay Area last  
> summer, but not a lot has been done on it since.

True, though we did at least create a place to capture what's been done:

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

While fairly crude so far, the core concept is that forms are in fact  
a great way to specify a RESTful web service, so if we solve one  
problem we solve the other. :-)

In addition, the work on datatypes might be relevant here as well:

http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/datatypes
(which I'm revising to incorporate Tantek's excellent suggestions :-)

-- Ernie P.

>
> I think there's a couple potential uses of <form>'s regarding (low) 
> rest-ful APIs.
>
> First of all, you can probably reuse microformats vocabulary to  
> markup forms. Rough example:
>
> <form class="vcard">
>    <fieldset class="n">
>      <input class="given-name" />
>      <input clas"family-name" />
>     </fieldset>
> </form>
>
> Something like that.
>
> Also, html forms could be useful for documenting the parameters  
> available on rest resources. Mixed with microformats, as above,  
> this could be a very useful way to document a rest api. It would  
> cover much the same territory as WADL, but in a web-native way  
> which can be very useful to developers, as the forms are a  
> functional sandbox.