"the author would prefer you had API resources at the same URIs as your user-facing web content"
I thought one of the principles of RESTful design is that the internal structure of URLs shouldn't really matter - you should be able to navigate to any resource from being given a single base URL. So i struggle to see what difference it makes if RESTful API consumers see different URLs to browser users....
It's because your parent is making a different claim than the author. The author is saying that you shouldn't be running two different services to expose the exact same data, which is not the same claim as "your API has the same URLs as your web content."
A lot of this comes down to what you mean by "API"...
I thought one of the principles of RESTful design is that the internal structure of URLs shouldn't really matter - you should be able to navigate to any resource from being given a single base URL. So i struggle to see what difference it makes if RESTful API consumers see different URLs to browser users....