Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API by Vinay Sahni
Design principles for APIs.
An API is a user interface for developers. Put the effort in to ensure it’s not just functional but pleasant to use.
The lie of the API by Ruben Verborgh
I agree completely with the sentiment of this article (although the title is perhaps a bit overblown): you shouldn’t need a separate API—that’s what you’re existing URL structure should be.
I’m not entirely sure that content negotiation is the best way to go when it comes to serving up different representations: there’s a real value in being able to paste a URL into a browser window to get back a JSON or XML representation of a resource.
But this is spot-on about the ludicrous over-engineered complexity of most APIs. It’s ridiculous that I can enter a URL into a browser window to get an HTML representation of my latest tweets, but I have to sign up for an API key and jump through OAuth hoops, and agree to display the results in a specific way if I want to get a JSON representation of the same content. Ludicrous!
Related links
HTML Emails: A Rant - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
The day we started to allow email clients to be full-blown web browsers (but without the protections of browsers) was the day we lost — time, security, privacy, and effectiveness. Now we spend all our time fighting with the materials of an email (i.e. color and layout) rather than refining its substance (i.e. story and language).
Think like it’s 1995; code like it’s 2035 - Grayscale
This is such a great write-up of the workshop I did in Hong Kong!
Jeremy, it was a pleasure to work with you and you are always welcome here in Hong Kong!
If you fancy having this one-day workshop at your company, get in touch.
Web Design in 4 minutes
This is a wonderful way of progressively explaining the layered approach to building for the web that Charlotte was teaching in her Codebar workshop.
“Content & Display Patterns,” an article by Dan Mall
A really terrific article from Dan on building pattern libraries. In summary:
- Naming things is hard,
- Separation of content and presentation is A Good Thing.
There are some really good insights here into getting just the right level of abstraction for a component—not too tightly tied to a specific visual display, but also not too tightly tied to a specific kind of content type:
When thinking about patterns, content strategists are primarily thinking about Content patterns, designers are primarily thinking about Display patterns, and front-end developers are responsible for bringing the two together.
(And it’s great to see Charlotte’s excellent article get a shout-out in the “Related reading” section at the end,)
Related posts
Declaration
HTML. JavaScript. Why not both?
Good form
Science, the web, and user experience.
The URI is the thing
My name is Jeremy and I am a URL fetishist.