Preserving REST-ful Visibility Of Rich Web Applications With Generalized Hypermedia Controls
Carson Gross, Matt Revelle · ACM SIGWEB Newsletter · 2024
This research investigates how the visibility benefits of the REST architectural style can be pre- served through the use of generalized hypermedia controls without sacrificing user experience in web applications. JavaScript, an implementation of the code-on-demand constraint of REST, has been used to enable rich user experiences on the World Wide Web (WWW) but its use has increasingly become detrimental to visibility in modern web applications. We review the benefits provided by visibility to the WWW and the tension between visibility and code-on-demand. The concept of generalized hypermedia controls is presented and we demonstrate how generalized hypermedia controls preserve visibility while enabling a rich user experience in real-world web applications.