Designing A Url Structure For Bbc Programmes | Smethurst / quote 12 of 12
Restful urls
In keeping with the principle of universal access to information, /programmes was designed to be RESTful. Not RESTful as in a RESTful API and some other separate website thing somewhere else. But RESTful as in some resources and some representations where one of those representations just happens to be HTML. But could be JSON or YAML or XML or RDF-XML or ICS or RSS or XSPF. And which representation you get back depends on what you choose to accept.
Or at least that was the case when /programmes still supported content negotiation. These days you have to request a specific representation by adding an extension to the URL (except for HTML which comes back as default (obviously)). So adding .json brings back JSON, .xml returns vanilla XML, .rdf gets you RDF-XML, .ics added to schedule views gets you ICS files and adding /segments.xspf to an episode page with a tracklist will bring back an XSPF playlist. Obviously not all URLs support all representations and some are more specialised than others.