[uf-rest] Microformats for <form> ?

[Ryan King]

On Mar 21, 2006, at 8:55 AM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> On 2006/03/20, at 12:20 PM, Ryan King wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Is that really the case? A form seems almost like a choreography to  
> me (although I'm fairly ignorant of that world); i.e., it tells you  
> how to do one task, rather than document the whole interface.
>
> E.g., if I have a resource that accepts GET, POST, PUT and DELETE,  
> the form is probably only going to tickle one of those methods...  
> You could put together a set of forms that covered all of the  
> ground, of course, but for some tasks, that's pretty clunky.

You're right, a given form will only cover one of the verbs. Of  
course, but going this route we're talking about low-rest (or two- 
verb rest), so PUT and DELETE are already out of consideration. As  
for the other verbs, it would certainly be neccessary to have a  
collection of forms to completely document an interface.

Is it clunky? yeah, probably. Just throwing out ideas here, though.

-rk