[pas]

It looks like this is a case of the stereotypical academization. Fielding looked at the Web, and abstracted it, and calls it REST Architecture.

And of course, the problem is that nobody sits down to just do a quick World Wide Web API for an app, or an internal corporate business-as-usual thingie. In fact since the original hypertext project at CERN no one every did it. We still use the same Web, incrementally transformed into what it is today, but still the same HTML, same Content-Types, and HTML1.0-like markup. All eaten and excreted by JavaScript of course, but that's a prime example of something incremental, and not exactly thought out.

Moreover, there's not much to say about media types driving interaction, because 99.9% of the Web is GET GET GET. And OPTIONS (due CORS) is driven by out-of-band conventions (defined in the Fetch and the amended XHR APIs, but not much to do with media types - but of course, CORS is more about fixing the leaky encapsulations of the communications interface/layer, not about the content [the high level state being transferred]).

[LoSboccacc]

> Fielding looked at the Web, and abstracted it, and calls it REST Architecture.

yeah the perfect rest protocol is the web and the perfect rest clients are the humans that navigate the action represented on the hypermedia.

that said, there's some value to be had in discoverability, even if rest grossly gloss over how to discover parameters for the action that the state holds.

[masklinn]

> that said, there's some value to be had in discoverability, even if rest grossly gloss over how to discover parameters for the action that the state holds.

There absolutely is and API systems like graphql have taken that to heart (playing with a graphql explorer is delightful).

But forcing all programmatic interactions through a "discoverability" layer is not useful, yet that's essentially what REST (as originally formalised) mandates.