Peter Lacey Williams posts here and here on how to version RESTful Web Services using custom MIME media types and I find this very interesting. I do find the following quote about the browser a little curious:
They (browsers) are almost certainly not the target consumer of the services
If your web applications are RESTful in nature, then the browser is definitely the target consumer of them. So I’m not sure if Peter is suggesting that with services that return HTML as a content type, there aren’t versioning issues or that services that would face versioning issues generally do not use HTML as a content type.
The target consumer of most of the web services, REST or otherwise, I have ever created or used has not been the browser. Rather it is usually a custom program, or ten, consuming those services to do some other useful work for the organization.
If you are creating a web application it should by all means support HTML representations. But if you are creating a REST/HTTP service it will almost certainly need more semantically rich representations of the resources it exposes.
Oh and BTW, my name is Peter Williams not Peter Lacey. I am rather honored to have been mistaken for someone that smart and well written, though.
Ha. What a silly mistake! Thanks for your response.
I guess I’m saying that Web Application can (and maybe should) be RESTful in nature and hence need to use (XHTML) which can probably be versioned just as XML or any other content type would be.
[...] 30 05 2008 I commented on RESTful versioning as a response to Peter William’s post on the same subject matter as I [...]