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copied!<p>You are correct that the former URL is "better" and is more widely deployed. I don't think you would find this documented in any <em>standard</em>; it is rather more of a convention. Most articles and books covering REST do it that way.</p> <p>The reason for this is, as you say, that the path components in the URL match the structure of resources and sub-resources. In particular, all of the following should be valid URLs:</p> <ul> <li>website.com/</li> <li>website.com/books</li> <li>website.com/books/123</li> </ul> <p>In particular, note that it is <code>books/123</code>, <strong>not</strong> <code>book/123</code> like you have. I have seen the singular but IMHO the plural is better.</p> <p>For the URL <code>/books</code></p> <ul> <li>a GET gets all books, but you can restrict the books with query parameters, e.g. <code>/books?author=alice</code></li> <li>a POST adds a new book (with a server-generated id).</li> </ul> <p>For the URL <code>/books/123</code></p> <ul> <li>a GET gets that particular book</li> <li>a PUT replaces the book with that id (or adds a book with that client-generated id)</li> </ul> <p>Now if a book has blurbs and the blurbs are unique <em>only to a particular book</em> then you will add the following URLs:</p> <ul> <li>website.com/books/123/blurbs</li> <li>website.com/books/123/blurbs/72</li> </ul> <p>You can do the same for films and galleries, provided each gallery belonged to a single film. But if galleries existed for multiple films, then you would make <code>/galleries</code> a top-level URL. Navigating from a film to a gallery would still be fine. You wouldn't have a structured URL. You would instead get all galleries containing pictures from film 456 via a GET to</p> <ul> <li>website.com/galleries?film=456</li> </ul> <p>The general rule is that if you have an ownership relation for the subresources you can use structured urls, but if there is a looser relationship among top-level items, query parameters are fine. Don't fall into the common misconception that RESTful URLs don't have query parameters; they do. :)</p> <p>Now finally, to directly answer your question: <code>website.com/films/galleries/456</code> is not a good URL IMHO because <code>`website.com/films/galleries/</code> is not very useful. In fact I think it is rather ugly. What would it mean? All galleries? If so, it should be <code>website.com/galleries</code>.</p> <p>Again I don't think this is standardized anywhere, but it feels very common and conventional.</p>

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