links for 2008-01-22 | The Marketing Technology Blog

Jan

22nd

links for 2008-01-22

Posted in Daily Reads by del.icio.us at 10:22 am

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Snipr | Snipurl 2.0 | Snurl – Snippetty snip snip with your looong URLs!

Snipr has a very simple API available for creating short URLs out of long URLs

(tags: api dwarfurl tinyurl tools url)

Mike Schinkel

Snipr's API is cool, until you realize that it violates a principle tenet of web architecture; GETs should be "safe" (have no side effects.) See W3C's TAG Finding "When to use GET" which states "GET is used for safe interactions and SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval."

Several more references:

-- http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms#state
-- http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/784.html
-- http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/methods.html
-- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/200...

Mike Schinkel

Oh, and in case anyone thinks "GET must be safe" is just standardista mumbo-jumbo and it doesn't really matter, realize that is what a lot of people thought until the Google Web Accellerator fiasco. Here are some links:

-- http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2005/10/25/goo...
-- http://bitworking.org/news/I_m_sorry__I_can_t_k...
-- http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/google_web_a...

Also I'd highly recommend anyone wanting to design an API to discuss the best way to provide a RESTful API on the rest-discuss mailing list:

-- http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/

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