Chapter 13. SEF and RESTful Services
Resources on the web are accessed by the use of the Universal Resource Indicator, the URI. Although technology can lead to complicated formats for the URI, people prefer them to be readable. It is often thought that search engines also prefer a readable URI, and so making them look appealing has been a major part of efforts to make a CMS "search engine friendly". There are actually many other factors, including the handling of metadata and particularly titles.
A loosely related development is the rise of RESTful services. This is a move to adopt a style of interaction between websites that aims to naturally exploit the characteristics of the HTTP protocol, including the URI. The aim is to move away from protocols such as XML-RPC that wrap up all the information being passed to and fro, instead making more of it visible through standard features of web access. This includes the building of families of meaningful URIs.
Although the various applications added...
