JSON as hypermedia
27 04 2008Subbu here and Mike here talk about leveraging JSON as hypermedia and Mike makes the cogent point that (X)HTML works because the client (browser) “understands” (X)HTML - in other words, there are standards and a client can make assumptions based on standards. Microformats are also (X)HTML based.
There is no standard to way to express hypermedia in JSON. Mike suggests that we need clients. I suggest that we need a standard and clients will come. This standard doesn’t need to be complex but it basically needs to provide a standard way that machine clients can look at JSON representation and be able to make decisions and navigate URIs to change application state.
I’d like to see this happen.
I posted a reply to your comments on my blog and thought to follow up here, too. I agree that standards need to precede clients in this case. I suspect that, like most standards efforts, this one might be driven by the existence of a few clients that - while starting out independently - cause a convergence on a standard way to express and interpret JSON as a hypermedia format.