why use dot notation api endpoints?

Question

I'm currently looking at the api for slack and some other apps and I'm seeing that they are using a . in their api endpoints . Is there a reason or benefit using the . notation in stead of / ?

Example: https://slack.com/api/chat.update

Answer 1

There is no intrinsic benefit of one over the other. You could equally ask why most APIs use / , in stead of end points like http://example.com/grandparent.parent.child?modifier

The most obvious reason for the existence of a path like this in the past, was file system mapping. Maybe there was a chat.update.cgi script handling the request. Those sorts of limitations no longer apply however.

Also, it seems redundant to have /api/ in the path. I would be wary of using such systems. Their authors would seem to have forgotten that your whole website is your API regardless of whether the representations are HTML or JSON.