Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices
by Harihara Subramanian J, Anupama Murali, Pethuru Raj
Manipulation of resources
Resources, once identified, can be returned by the server in a different format, such as JSON, XML, HTML, PNG, SVG, and so on. These formats are a representation of the identified resources, and the client will understand the list of possible well-defined formats or media types (also called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME)) from the headers.
The resource's representation is manipulated or processed by clients. The application needs to support more than one representation of the same resource and the same URI; in other words, the same exact resource is represented by different clients in different ways.
Let's take an example; a document might be represented as JSON to an automated program, but as HTML to ...
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