[uf-rest] Microformats for <form> ?

[Jonathan Arkell]

Hagan Said...
> Enough intro to my question: Anybody using microformats to markup forms?
> Something along the line "I am a service, this is my <form> expecting
> the following microformats".

That is an interesting idea.  Are you thinking that the id/name of the
form elements would be equivalent to their respective microformat names?
 I.e. for a form, a persons contact information would have the form
name/values mapped to their respective hCard names.

This may not exactly what you are after, someone I have been talking to
has taken to adding an extra "request variable" (i.e. query string
element, form element, etc.) named "X-Rest-Method", which over-rides the
current request method, thus allowing a PUT, DELETE or OPTIONS request
(on account of form methods not allowing anything other then a GET or
PUT).  While I am not sure that there are many examples in the wild, it
certainly has potential.

Don King Replied...
> 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.

I really like this idea.  Having a well defined description of a REST
API that is done in the microformat style (i.e. semantically correct,
human and machine readable) could be a real boon.

I have something similar to that built.  As part of my Meditation
project (a framework to facilitate the building of REST APIs in PHP) I
have a facility set up called Gate that allows 3rd party authentication
a la flickr.  What I have done is very ajaxy-javascripty because I need
to have the client build sha1 sums.

The Gate Tester is here:
http://bunny.jonnay.net/projects/Meditation/test/gate/

I also have some fairly basic tests for the "Request Processors" inside
of meditation to test HTTP authentication, throttling, etc.
http://bunny.jonnay.net/projects/Meditation/test/

More info on my meditation project is here:
http://wiki.jonnay.net/bunny/meditation/meditation



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