Comments on: Users and self-description http://www.markbaker.ca/blog/2007/11/users-and-self-description/ Celebrating the power of the Web Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:00:51 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: Patrick Mueller http://www.markbaker.ca/blog/2007/11/users-and-self-description/comment-page-1/#comment-290 Patrick Mueller Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:49:26 +0000 http://www.markbaker.ca/blog/2007/11/09/users-and-self-description/#comment-290 Your description of the "shopping cart problem" reminds me of the discussions on batching requests that have recently come up. To some extent, you could imagine a shopping cart as a set of resources that you've GETted, and that checking out, you'd like to POST to all of them at once. That's not quite right of course, you'd want to represent the items as a capability of being purchased, and the POST to them executes it, or something. But anyway, this is a great example of the problems with batching, if you think about the real life situation of a "price change" or other status change of the item. A customer might want to just remove that item from the cart, they may decide to not buy anything, they may decide to complain to the store management. So, actually, I think a web browser COULD handle this case fairly easily, but it actually greatly complicates the ensuing understanding of the client / server interface, which is probably not a good thing. Your description of the “shopping cart problem” reminds me of the discussions on batching requests that have recently come up. To some extent, you could imagine a shopping cart as a set of resources that you’ve GETted, and that checking out, you’d like to POST to all of them at once. That’s not quite right of course, you’d want to represent the items as a capability of being purchased, and the POST to them executes it, or something. But anyway, this is a great example of the problems with batching, if you think about the real life situation of a “price change” or other status change of the item. A customer might want to just remove that item from the cart, they may decide to not buy anything, they may decide to complain to the store management.

So, actually, I think a web browser COULD handle this case fairly easily, but it actually greatly complicates the ensuing understanding of the client / server interface, which is probably not a good thing.

]]>