[lucideer]

> Because that's not what it is, in general. See Xanadu for an example of vastly more general kinds of linkages than references.

The purpose of very abstract, generalised, academic (also legal) language is to attempt to achieve perfect technical correctness in description. Unfortunately this usually comes at the cost of understanding.

"Text with links to other text" obviously won't include 100.000% of applications conforming to RESTfulness, but it does describe what RESTfulness intends far better and more accessibly than a convoluted explanation, which very effectively serves the purpose of informing people calling RPC REST that it is not in fact REST (for example). It also gives a broad audience a general direction to work toward if they intend to use REST (or a reasonable argument not to use it if it's not what they feel they need).

The accessible explanation serves an actual practical purpose, the pedantic explanation has no actual benefit. The fact that you had to reference a project as esoteric and dead-end as Xanadu is testament to this.