> Yikes. Nobody wants to implement a browser to create a UI for ordering meals from a restaurant.
You don't need a full web browser. Fielding published his thesis in 2000, browsers were almost trivial then, and the needs for programming are even more trivial: you can basically skip any HTML that isn't a link tag or form data for most purposes.
> baking the semantics of them into the client is that we don't want the behavior of the application to get tripped up on whether someone failed to close a <b> tag.
This is such a non-issue. Why aren't you worried about badly formatted JSON? Because we have well-tested JSON formatters. In a world where people understood the value of hypermedia as an interchange format, we'd be in exactly the same position.
And to be clear, if JSON had links as a first class type rather than just strings, then that would qualify as a hypermedia format too.
If I'm going to do HTML that isn't HTML then I might as well not do HTML, there's a lot of sharp edges in that particular markup that I'd prefer to avoid.
> Why aren't you worried about badly formatted JSON?
Because the json spec is much smaller than the HTML spec so it is much easier for the parser to prevalidate and reject invalid JSON.
Maybe I need to reread the paper and substitute "a good hypermedia language" for HTML conceptually, see if it makes more sense to me.
Fielding's thesis barely mentions HTML (20 times), and usually in the context of discussing standards or why JS beat Java applets, but he discusses hypermedia quite a bit (over 70 times).
If you extended JSON so that URLs (or URIs) were first-class, something like:
it would form a viable hypermedia format because then you can reliably distinguish references from other forms of data. I think the only reason something like this wasn't done is that Crockford wanted JSON to be easily parsable by existing JS interpreters.You can workaround this with JSON schema to some extent, where the schema identifies which strings are URLs, but that's just way more cumbersome than the distinction being made right in the format.