openstack team mailing list archive

[Bryan Taylor <btaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/26/2011 04:45 PM, Jorge Williams wrote:
> On Oct 26, 2011, at 1:19 PM, Bryan Taylor wrote:
>
> > So no pdfs or excel spreadsheets without conneg.
>
> But PDFs and excel spreadsheets are precisely why you want variants!

Reports and spreadsheets are presentation layer resources that should 
come from control panels and dashboards and not from a web services API 
layer.

In fact, it's with some reluctance that I even suggested having HTML  in 
the services layer, but we said an API goal was to target developers 
eyeballing our data formats in a browser. HTML is the best media type to 
use for this, leveraging the <pre> element, perhaps with some syntax 
highlighting eye candy.

> "Here's my usage stats for 2009...
>
> http://usage.api.acme.com/v1.0/jorgew/2009/usage.pdf";

That shouldn't be coming directly from an openstack API.

We're actually building a usage service on top of OpenStack and we don't 
have any PDFs in it. Dashboards, control panels, BI systems etc, should 
host that resource, not our APIs.

> You mean to tell me that I can't send that out as an e-mail? Instead I
> have to say
>
> "Please run this command to see my usage stats for 2009

Our use case is to show *developers* what the openstack API payloads 
look like, not to deal with arbitrary end user presentation desires.

> curl -H "Accept: application/vnd.acme.com+pdf;version=1.0"
> http://usage.api.acme.com/jorgew/2009/usage";

> That seems silly to me, we're missing an important feature, the ability
> to click.

We are adding an important feature by leaving it out: separation of 
presentation and data.