hypermedia systems

last updated: Oct 20, 2023

https://hypermedia.systems/

A free book available online

And yet, despite this ubiquity, the topic hypermedia itself is a strangely under-explored concept today, left mainly to specialists. Yes, you can find a lot of tutorials on how to author HTML, create links and forms, etc. But it is rare to see a discussion of HTML as a hypermedia and, more broadly, on how an entire hypermedia system fits together.

This is in contrast with the early web development era when concepts like Representational State Transfer (REST) and Hypermedia As The Engine of Application State (HATEOAS) were discussed frequently, refined and debated among web developers.

In a sad turn of events, today, the world’s most popular hypermedia, HTML, is often viewed resentfully: it is an awkward, legacy markup language that must be grudgingly used to build user interfaces in what are increasingly entirely Javascript-based web applications.

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