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= Foreword
The history of hypermedia systems is varied and circuitous. While there have been many books on the topic of hypermedia, there is a select number of publications that chronicle important advances in the field of hypermedia and this book is one of them. From the starting
In 1974, Ted Nelson's _"Computer Lib/Machine Dreams"_ marked the start of the modern hypermedia era with a book that Steven Leby (author of _"Hackers"_) described as "the epic of the computer revolution." Nelson is credited with coining the terms HyperText, HyperLink, HyperMedia, and HyperData as well as "Intertwingluarity" -- that notion that all information is connected -- both intertwined and intermingled. Almost half a century ago, he foretold a future where any person could publish anything anytime without the need for permission from any central controlling source. And his hyperlinks were the engine of that future.
It took two decades before Nelson's idea of intertwingled computing became widespread. Along the way, Douglas Engelbart created the _oN-Line System_ or NLS, Wendy Hall built the _Microcosm_, and, eventually Tim Beneres-Lee defined the World Wide Web (WWW) in the late 1980s. It was Berners-Lee's iteration that has become the backbone and the "standard" for the intertingularity we all experience today.
By the year 2000, the technical foundations of the "web" were documented in Roy Fielding's PhD dissertation (_"Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures"_). In that work, Fielding defined the architectural model of _REpresentational State Transfer_ or REST. This set of system properties and implemenation constraints have proven -- even a quarter-cenruty later -- to be a reliable model for designing and building the intertwingled machines that today affects billions of people around the globe.
Even though Fielding's work as important, it wasn't until Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby published _"RESTful Web Services"_ in 2008 that the REST model became well-known to the world of software architecture and development. Backed by the Ruby programming platform, the ideas behind Fielding's REST model became _de rigueur_ for the creation of web-based services and client applications.
One of the reasons Richardson and Ruby's work was so important was that, unlike dissertations and futuristic predictions, the _RESTful Web Services_ book outlined a practical working framework for building powerful applications for the Web. It described not only the power of REST but also provied step-by-step instructions on how to build them. Richard and Ruby brought together the hypermedia scholarship of the previous twenty years all in one place.
And that is what this book does, too.
Finally, to quote the authors of this book. "Hypermedia was a great idea! It still is!"