[reinhardt]

Ok, so you can "parse" it, which is just a way of saying you can transform a bunch of bytes to a nested structure consisting of a few basic types (dicts, lists, strings, floats, etc). Now what? What can you (or actually your program, not you as a human) do with it without some sort of schema, explicit or implicit?

[jcrites]

Nothing. Exactly!

REST is not for machine-driven interactions. It's for humans browsing websites.

[masklinn]

Uh... no.

[j-g-faustus]

    The REST interface is designed to be efficient for large-
    grain hypermedia data transfer, optimizing for the common 
    case of the Web, but resulting in an interface that is 
    not optimal for other forms of architectural interaction.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch... (Section 5.1.5)

    When a link is selected, information needs to be moved 
    from the location where it is stored to the location
    where it will be used by, in most cases, a human reader.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch... (Section 5.2.1)

It certainly sounds like "human browsing" was the primary use case. Unless I missed something?

[icebraining]

Yes, it's obviously the primary use case, since REST is modeled after HTTP. But the keyword is primary - it doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be used for machine-driven workflows.