Building for Search Engines: Following REST

Abstract

in this volume. Aaron Swartz, the author, had interacted with Tim for a number of years (starting when Aaron was 12) and had been very involved in the development of RDF and other Semantic Web standards. Additionally, Aaron interacted with Tim as he went on to understand more aspects of the Web architecture and how they could be used for the applications that Aaron is well known for – his involvement in the development of the RSS feed, his design of the ‘markdown’ language that is now heavily used in web authoring, his work in co-founding reddit, and his role in the design and use of creative commons licenses. As much as Aaron is known for helping to bring online activism into being, he is known to the technical community for his contributions to the Web. Aaron kept up a blog on many of his thoughts about the Web, and in early 2012 agreed to turn these into a book entitled “A Programmable Web.” Unfortunately, at the time of his death in 2013, the book was still unfinished, and all that existed was an early draft he had submitted to a Morgan-Claypool series on the Semantic Web. The publishers agreed to make the unfinished manuscript available to the public for free, and it is available online.1 The draft manuscript included a chapter on the “Representational State Transfer” (REST) architecture that is a key building block of web design. Given Aaron’s