Microformats for fast REST APIs?

Microformats have been described as a set open data format standards for structured blogging and web content publishing. They have been tried out, for example, in the realm of XHTML. One tenet of the microformat movement has been to try to work with existing architectures and patterns, sometimes described as ‘paving the cow paths’.

British microformat maven,  Silverlight fan and .NET developer Chris Hayuk recently put forward the idea of applying microformatting to REST API issues.

He writes:

The big issue as far as I can see it is that decent client proxy generators don’t seem to exist. You either have to download a client library built by the developer / an open source project / build one yourself.

Hayuk breifly reviews client proxy generation via the WCF REST Starter Kit, DSL’s (OSLO), and C# 4.0. He then opines on microformats, REST and APIs. One wonders if Sun’s WADL will meet folks needs in this space ..

Related API info
Silverlight REST API microformat – .NET, Silverlight, Windows Azure, and other ramblings (from the UK) blog
soapUI testing for WADL and REST – SearchSOA.com