Presentation: TweetBuilding Hypermedia APIs with HTML

While hypermedia APIs have begun to receive increased attention, most development efforts have revolved around building custom media types like HAL or Siren, typically by layering hypermedia affordances onto JSON. We recently took a different path and leveraged a ubiquitous, existing hypermedia type: HTML. With out-of-the-box support for debugging tools (i.e. your browser), hypermedia controls (links and forms), and even semantic tagging (microdata), we found HTML offered all the expressiveness we needed. In this talk we'll discuss the pros and cons that we experienced while using HTML for an API media type, as well as discussing the particulars of implementation patterns, from representations to building programmatic HTML clients. We will also include a demo of a new, open source client library that makes APIs built in this style extremely accessible to developers.