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Comment by thibauts | Hacker News Reader

> Hint: Your browser is an API client

Apart from parsing, I am the API client in this instance. I'm the one making decisions from understanding what services are about.

The universal API client seems to be a kind of silver-bullet-IA in many people's mind. I feel it's both impossible and not necessary to accomplish that. The complexity we have to handle to use APIs is already minimal.

What makes hypermedia interesting IMHO is (minor point) easier intra-linking within a webservice, and (major point) the ability within a service to point to resources from another one.

This will enable the distributed web we are all waiting for.

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> Apart from parsing, I am the API client in this instance. I'm the one making decisions from understanding what services are about.

Your browser parses, yes, but then it goes and fetches images, css, javascript, iframes, etc. Following the analogy, these are 'api calls'. It knows to make these calls because the HTML defined the links, and for the HTML to be rendered the contents of the links are required.

I maintain the browser is the client - it responds to your actions, but it does so with a lot more activity than just parsing.

>What makes hypermedia interesting IMHO is (minor point) easier intra-linking within a webservice, and (major point) the ability within a service to point to resources from another one. > >This will enable the distributed web we are all waiting for.

Couldn't agree more. But without some standards, those links to other services may not be as useful as they could be.

Sure css, js etc are fetched, but this is hard-coded behaviour, there is nothing dynamic or discovered about it. Or I fail to understand it.

This may well be the problem then, as we can see here and elsewhere. Many people like me don't understand. The claims are too vague. We need real-world exemples of how this can be applied with clear benefits. Mere transposition of the hypertext qualities to a medium intended for machine consumption will not do it for most of us.

> Sure css, js etc are fetched, but this is hard-coded behaviour, there is nothing dynamic or discovered about it. Or I fail to understand it.

It grabs the links from the content of the document it retrieved, using the rules of HTMLs structure to find them. That's both dynamic and discovered.

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