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Comment by wild_egg | Hacker News Reader

Deja vu with this blog. Another overengineered abstraction recreating things that already exist.

Misunderstanding REST only to reinvent it in a more complex way. If your API speaks JSON, it's not REST unless/until you jump through all of these hoops to build a hypermedia client on top of it to translate the bespoke JSON into something meaningful.

Everyone ignores the "hypermedia constraint" part of REST and then has to work crazy magic to make up for it.

Instead, have your backend respond with HTML and you get everything else out of the box for free with a real REST interface.

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>Another overengineered abstraction recreating things that already exist.

This section is for you: https://overreacted.io/jsx-over-the-wire/#html-ssi-and-cgi

>Everyone ignores the "hypermedia constraint" part of REST and then has to work crazy magic to make up for it.

Right, that's why I've linked to https://htmx.org/essays/how-did-rest-come-to-mean-the-opposi... the moment we started talking about this. The post also clarifies multiple times that I'm talking about how REST is used in practice, not its "textbook" interpretation that nobody refers to except in these arguments.

> This section is for you: https://overreacted.io/jsx-over-the-wire/#html-ssi-and-cgi

Strawmanning the alternative as CGI with shell scripts really makes the entire post that much weaker.

> nobody refers to except in these arguments.

Be the change, maybe? People use REST like this because people write articles like this which uses REST this way.

>Strawmanning the alternative as CGI with shell scripts really makes the entire post that much weaker.

I wasn't trying to strawman it--I was genuinely trying to show the historical progression. The snark was intended for the likely HN commenter who'd say this without reading, but the rest of the exploration is sincere. I tried to do it justice but lmk if I missed the mark.

>Be the change, maybe?

That's what I'm trying to do :-) This article is an argument for hypermedia as the API. See the shape of response here: https://overreacted.io/jsx-over-the-wire/#the-data-always-fl...

I think I've sufficiently motivated why that response isn't HTML originally; however, it can be turned into HTML which is also mentioned in the article.

The hypermedia constraint is crazy magic itself. It's not like HATEOAS is fewer steps on the application and server side.

We already have a way one way to render things on the browser, everyone. Wrap it up, there's definitely no more to explore here.

And while we're at it, I'd like to know, why are people still building new and different game engines, programming languages, web browsers, operating systems, shells, etc, etc. Don't they know those things already exist?

Joking aside, what's wrong with finding a new way of doing something? This is how we learn and discover things.

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