Engineers like us can be such snots sometimes. If as a culture we want people to build great RESTful apis and a company attempts to do so, public shaming isn't the answer.
But. Their homegrown text serialization format is pretty wack. They couldn't just use CSV?
That culture of being "snots" comes from engineers in the real world. The one where this kind of attention to detail means buildings fall on people.
I agree that maybe it's not necessary to carry over that cultural legacy to the internet, although so far it's worked pretty well.
If social pressure (public shaming) isn't the answer then what kind of pressure should be used? Public shaming is a pretty civilized way to enforce rules when you have no top down control that dictates those rules, I can't think of any alternatives that would be less harsh.
According to some the latest hn posts about facebook, in our industry you're doing something wrong if the building doesn't fall over from time to time ; ).
Public shaming can be a good idea, especially on people who are knowingly breaking the rules and holding back progress (See IE6).
However, I'm just glad people are creating APIs, especially because basically no one gets REST right anyways (Hint: if you can't click around your api in firefox with the JSONView extension, it's probably not RESTful).
Agreed. I was mostly hoping to mitigate any conclusion that the design was a result of them being .Net developers. :)
Luckily there are some constructive comments in this post which point out some valid concerns. This is a good chance to share opinions and learn a bit. Unfortunately there are a lot of developers out there who are tasked with projects and have no one in-house with experience. I was in that boat and it took developing and maintaining a lot of bad APIs to learn what made a good one.
