Question

On the Microformats spec for RESTful URLs:

GET /people/1
return the first record in HTML format

GET /people/1.html
return the first record in HTML format

and /people returns a list of people

So is /people.html the correct way to return a list of people in HTML format?

Answer 1

If you just refer to the URL path extension, then, yes, that scheme is the recommended behavior for content negotiation:

• path without extension is a generic URL (e.g. /people for any accepted format)
• path with extension is a specific URL (e.g. /people.json as a content-type-specific URL for the JSON data format)

With such a scheme the server can use content negotiation when the generic URL is requested and respond with a specific representation when a specific URL is requested.

Documents that recommend this scheme are among others:

• Cool URIs don’t change
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web
• Content Negotiation: why it is useful, and how to make it work