[mainguy]

I've had this discussion about hundred times now. REST "standards" are as important and significant as brace indentation "standards". A big problem with REST is that it is NOT a canonical (or even important) standard, but rather a useful pattern than can be used to make things exposed via HTTP more intuitive. The evil side effect of this is that a metric crapton of architects/engineers are wasting fifty bajillion programming-hours arguing irrelevant details about who's doing it "right" instead of building useful software. You cannot do REST "wrong" and more than you can do software "wrong"... Folks who argue about the "right" way of doing software are usually "wrong" because they are focused on writing software instead of solving problems.

We need to keep our priorities straight.

[stanleydrew]

I understand your frustration but I think you are misguided. Standards (and their cousins, best practices) are important to think about in order to create diverse yet maintainable and inter-operable systems.

"A big problem with REST is that it is NOT a canonical (or even important) standard, but rather a useful pattern than can be used to make things exposed via HTTP more intuitive."

No, its not meant to make HTTP interfaces "more intuitive". HTTP clients are machines. They don't have intuition. When your web browser hits the HN front page, it isn't using intuition to figure out what links to display.

You can make an argument that for a particular web service, adhering to a particular principle of REST doesn't matter. But you have suggested that the principles of rest never need to be an important consideration for any web service, which I submit is plainly false.