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points by Aurornis 2 days ago | 0 comments
> it's basically just a REST API

The opening has 1 paragraph and 5 table entries. One of them is “Not REST”

It’s a little scary that this was considered too dense or complex because the basics were explained in something that could be read in 1 minute. That still wasn’t enough to stop the top HN comment (as I write this) from calling it too dense and giving incorrect information that is immediately refuted by skimming the top part of the article.

[–] sharifhsn 2 days ago
It is not technically REST, but it is basically REST. The alternative to a server endpoint is JSON-RPC over stdin which has the same request/response format as REST. This is exactly the point about over-complicating it by saying "it's not REST, it's not JSON-RPC". It's a JSON request/response protocol with a defined format.
[–] jazzypants 2 days ago
REST !== JSON-RPC

https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypert...

[–] krackers 2 days ago
See also the discussion in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507076

Particularly this subthread which was my moment of enlightenment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507991. A truly restful API isn't for a program to consume, it's for _you_, the user to consume through your user agent. Clicking on links is a hypermedia driven, restful api.

I think I saw a comment somewhere by the htmx dev, that Fielding was just giving a name to how the web already was at the time, hyperlinks rendered by a browser that you can navigate in a stateless way to get things done without the user agent being coupled to the sites themselves. It makes sense when you view it as backward-looking academic analysis rather than practical prescriptive advice.

But once you have that defined you can talk about whether things are more or less restful. That's separate from whether something being "more restful" is even good or desired though.

[–] jazzypants 1 day ago
Yeah, it's Fielding's Ph.D. thesis where he's expounding on his work on HTTP 1.0 and 1.1. He's literally just explaining how the web works. It's pretty crazy how much people have misinterpreted it.
[–] tasuki 2 days ago
> It is not technically REST, but it is basically REST.

What does that even mean?

> the same request/response format as REST

What request/response format does REST have?

Do you even know what HATEOAS means?

[–] parineum 2 days ago
That's the purpose of the comment, to make a comparison that's simpler than the article that is missing from the article.

If the article said, "It's basically just REST". There'd be no need to comment as such.

[–] wongarsu 2 days ago
The opening is fine, but when you click "Start the lessons" you get a six-pane interface that imho is pretty overwhelming

Yeah, I can click around and follow what's going on. But I'm with GP: this is not making it easier to understand. It's great at being Hollywood UX: looks pretty, stuff moving everywhere. One click on "step" makes the image animate, and change the text in the left sidebar, top middle, and right sidebar, in addition to stepping the table in the bottom middle. But it's almost the opposite of distilling information

[–] steve_adams_86 2 days ago
> you get a six-pane interface that imho is pretty overwhelming

Agreed, and it probably doesn't need to be overwhelming but the design choices leave the intent and purpose of the UI fairly unclear. It requires a bit of clicking around to understand what it's all for, and it's quite flat and unappealing, leaving little drive to do that work.

[–] taneq 2 days ago
While we’re applauding brevity, three cheers for the first line being “model context protocol”. While yes, this one is common, it’s still nice not having to scroll through 20 screens of blah to still not find out what the thing is.
[–] iugtmkbdfil834 2 days ago
Sign of times man. Not that long ago -- on HN mind you -- someone posted an article that landed on main page that used lsblk as some sort of secret hacker linux command.
[–] sleepybrett 2 days ago
This is actually one of the better 'mcp explained' type 'articles' i've read.
[–] flanz_10 2 days ago
> The opening has 1 paragraph and 5 table entries. One of them is “Not REST”

and yet...