Media Types

Contracts define how different parts of a distributed system should interact and media types play an important part in contracts.

 A media type is a combination of formats, processing model, and hypermedia controls.

We can use many standardized media type specifications or create new media types to fit our domain.

Standardized media types (e.g., XHTML or Atom) are well-defined and widely understood. Since many systems support these standardized media types, interoperability between them can be easily achieved by using them.

Custom media types help us to add application specific semantics on the top of generic media types handlers. Jim Webber mentioned a nice example in his blog about custom media type:

"For example, if you get an Atom representation, then you automatically understand (globally) how to interpret the atom:link links within; with a custom hypermedia type (... application/restbucks+xml) you automatically understand (within the Restbucks context) how to interpret links; but for application/xml you have no idea how to extract hypermedia controls unless you have some prior knowledge of the schema."

Reference: REST in Practice - Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson