On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 3:09 AM, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts@worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
On Tue, 2009-07-07 at 22:52 +0200, Johan Tibell wrote:
> To be RESTfull this should just be $URL to avoid forcing servers to
> have a resource called jumptable.

What do real REST designs really do in this kind of situation? For the
parts of sites intended to be consumed by humans that's easy, you use
index.html and that provides links humans can choose to follow.

For sites where automated and somewhat-coupled clients (ie not totally
generic clients like caches, web spiders etc) are expecting certain
services (it is that expectation that is the coupling), how do they
discover the urls for the services they are (or might be) expecting?

Do people really concoct little text or xml files giving name -> url
mappings? Is there some common standard format for doing that?

I don't know of a standard format. You could indeed use XML (or perhaps JSON). By letting the server specify its URL scheme (instead of relying on out-of-band knowledge about resource locations) it can be more flexible.

-- Johan