Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node

Foreword

Leonard Richardson, November 2011

You can’t talk about something if you don’t have the words.

The World Wide Web is driven by hypermedia: the ability of a document to describe its possible states, and its relationship to other documents. Hypermedia is not just a way of making websites that average people can use; it’s a new style for distributed computing, powerful and flexible.

There’s nothing new about the web technologies or the hypermedia concept: in another world, we could have been using hypermedia for distributed computing since the mid-1990s. Instead, we’ve been slow to adopt hypermedia for anything but consumer use. It’s an easy concept to grasp intuitively—we all use the Web—but it’s difficult to understand in a context of development.

Our problems stem from conceptual blocks. The Web invaded our everyday lives years before its architecture was formally described. We’ve spent the twenty-first century making gradual progress, coming up with new vocabulary to help developers come to terms with the power of the Web—power that was there all along.

The description of hypermedia you’ll read in this book is, in my opinion, one of the biggest conceptual advances since Roy Fielding first defined the REST architectural style. Mike Amundsen has taken the blanket term “hypermedia” and taken it apart to see exactly what it can mean and how it works.

What makes a data format useful for some applications and not others? Why is HTML so versatile, even for nonconsumer applications, ...