RESTful Service Theory: Difference between revisions

The ''representation'' of a resource need not (and in web services, probably ''will'' not) be anything like the way it is stored at source (i.e. on the server). Typically that representation will be in some platform-neutral form such as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML HTML], [[XML]], [https://www.json.org/ JSON], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64 base64] or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_text plain text] (all of which are ''actually'' forms of plain text). In the case of RESTful web services, JSON is by far the commonest representation, although some services do support XML as an alternative.