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0 pointsrubyrescue14y ago0 comments

good point, but the point of a restful resource is that the url represents a resource, but then w/accept header versioning, i now need two pieces of data, one of which isn't visible, to properly represent and retrieve a resource.

I guess my point is that if i have to pick, i'd rather occasionally have two request urls with a minor version difference that are actually the same resource than two urls that appear to be the same resource but are not because one was requested with a header that affects the returned data.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

icebraining14y ago· 2 in thread

You're confusing resource with representation. An URL is a resource, but if the representation of that is a JSON document or a picture of him/her, that's up to the server. Just because an header affects the representation of a resource, doesn't mean they're different resources.

rubyrescueOP14y ago

actually that's a good example that makes my point. if i said to you - well if you want to retrieve a person's user information, just GET /users/1 with Accept: text/json. If you want their photo, just GET /users/1 with Accept: image/jpeg - philosophically, i'm not violating the 'rules of REST' but it feels wrong to me.

icebraining14y ago

Sure, I would create a "User's photo" resource too and link it from /users/1, but that's because a user's photo can be a new resource, so it can have its own URL.

stanleydrew14y ago· 2 in thread

What do you mean by visible? Visible in the URL bar of a browser? The headers are all there in the request, for all to see.

rubyrescueOP14y ago

yes i'm thinking more pragmatically. From an API perspective the header is part of the request but given that the human-readability of urls is a feature of http, it just somehow feels wrong to me to modify the response based on a request header.

glassx14y ago

I think most developers don't see that as a problem.

We modify the response all the time based on headers like User-Agent, Referer, If-Unmodified-Since, Accept-Language and others, so using Accept for versioning isn't really that strange.

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