REST + microformats as a Bugzilla API

[Gervase Markham]

Myk Melez wrote:
> The piece I'm mostly interested in is the way we design our HTML 
> responses.  I think it would be productive for us to structure them with 
> embedded metadata so clients which want to use them to programmatically 
> access data can do so.

My concern here is that, by doing this, we create another interface 
which we have to keep stable. That means we reduce our flexibility to 
change the interface based on usability or other feedback, or as web 
standards evolve. Say we wanted to switch show_bug to entirely semantic 
markup. What if someone was depending on the fact that we used a table 
in order to navigate to the node they wanted?

Additionally, because the metadata is embedded in a browser-viewable 
HTML response, it's also not completely clear what the interface 
actually is. One client may choose to access the attachment list using 
the equivalent of getElementsByClassName("attachment"), another may 
choose getElementsById("attachments").childNodes() or something like 
that. Unless we plan to document the supported methods for extracting 
the data?

It would certainly be useful to have some concrete use cases, along with 
a reason why our current web services interface is inappropriate in each 
case.

Gerv