Analysis from the Bottom Up

The Hypertext Constraint

I have spent quite a bit of time recently designing a system in the REST style. Two main observations from that process:

Web search is still pretty terrible once you need something more than a company’s homepage or a wikipedia entry. There is a vast wealth of information dispensed by experts everyday in venues that don’t attract large numbers of links. Finding that information is way more painful that it needs to be.
99% of people writing about the REST style seem to have totally missed the most important constraint: Hypermedia as the engine of application state (HATEOAS). If that concept was better understood by more people we might finally make some progress on things other than how to make pretty URLs. It took a significant amount of time to discover just how important that constraint is for the REST style (very, by the way, like, it’s everything, no HATEOAS, no REST, not even close), and that really slowed down the design process for me.

Here is some HATEOAS link love so as to do my part to improve the state of knowledge on REST in those link counting search engines