JSON API

I think it's great that we're talking about standardising how we build RESTful JSON APIS. However I don't think this has got it quite right yet. What's the reason for the top level rel? It seems like it's just there to stop the urls from being repeated and to save space, but isn't that what gzip is for? Why complicate the data format and require all that extra logic and gzip would remove most of the redundancy before transmission anyway?…

For people who have been dealing with the churn of JSON API, represented throughout this thread, I'm genuinely sorry. Let me try to give some perspective on the history. For a long time, JSON API was more of a set of guidelines than a strict specification. A lot of our early adopters hated all of the MAYs in the spec (you can see examples of that throughout this thread), so we decided to tighten things up considerably towards the end…

This is a hypermedia-optional, not-quite-RPC, not-quite-REST style spec that actually corresponds rather well with the kinds of JSON-on-the-wire, HTTP-as-a-protocol APIs that people in the 2010s tend to cook up. Their FAQ backs this up by saying: "(...) JSON API is an attempt to formalize similar ad hoc client-server interfaces that use JSON as an interchange format." Because this style of HTTP API is very common, this spec is more useful than it may seem. It's no secret that most "RESTful"…