One year ago, I wrote on Twitter that “my next API will be semantic XHTML”. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about Hypermedia APIs with HTML (and have done some prototyping). My dream API would use XHTML with RDFa, link to Atom feeds and offer an alternative JSON-LD representation.

Here’s a few articles on that topic that made me think:

It all started for me with Using HTML as the Media Type for your API by Jon Moore. Make sure to read this. And the “ugly website” Rickard Öberg quote tweeted by Stefan Tilkov.

Combining HTML Hypermedia APIs and Adaptive Web Design by Gustaf Nilsson Kotte is also a great read.

Then watch the full talk (53 minutes) by Jon Moore on Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML.

If you’ve got some time left, I highly recommend the RESTful Web Services book by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. It already said this, back in 2007: “It might seem a little odd to use XHTML […] as a representation format for a web service. I chose it […] because HTML solves many general markup problems and you’re probably already familiar with it. […] Though it’s human-readable and easy to render attractively, nothing prevents well-formed HTML from being processed automatically like XML.” (By the way, the follow-up RESTful Web APIs is going to be published next month.)

I haven’t read the book Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node by Mike Amundsen yet, but it sounds interesting.

Please let me know if I missed out on something important…

Update (2017-12-01): See my follow-up post Publish your data, don’t build APIs.

Update (2018-05-31): Jason Desrosiers – The Hypermedia Maturity Model.