[uf-rest] Microformats for <form> ?

[sixtus at gmail.com]

>
> markup forms. Rough example:
>
> <form class="vcard">
>     <fieldset class="n">
>       <input class="given-name" />
>       <input clas"family-name" />
>      </fieldset>
> </form>
>
> Something like that.


Yes, something like that. To be precise, exactly this is what I had in mind.
I just didn't know <fieldset> Thanks for 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.


I couldn't have said it better :-) Except that the form *is* the service
interface, not just a sandbox.

In that context, "lo-rest" is service-oriented, "high-rest" is
resource-oriented. Yes?

That just leaves me with the question of how to encode the expected result (
i.e. the content of the resulting POST). Two things come to my mind:

   1. Encode it within the form
   2. Force the form target to be different and do a get on it

I prefer 1. for various reasons, but I am open for suggestions on how this
encoding might look like.

It should contain:

   - A human readable description of the service
   - A parsable description of the content expected, possibly pointing to
   XMDPs

The second point brings up two questions:

   1. Microformats solve the problem of parsing the content within html,
   but how to identitfy (address) it? We can not safely assume designers to
   include ID-attributes, can we? XPath? HTML-Anchors?
   2. From there to something like relax-ng is not very far. Do we need
   to go there?

Just some ideas, I wish I had time to flesh them out more.


For once, I can live with that, as this will hopefully turn into a chapter
of my dissertation ;-)

Thanks for all the help!
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