[JimDabell]

> The "standard" creator choosing not to document its meaning really didn't help.

REST isn’t a standard, it’s an architectural style. And I’m not sure how you can say that the author chose not to document its meaning when the name “REST” originated with the author’s PhD dissertation.

[hbrn]

Fielding's dissertation was about WWW. It turns out that 20+ years later, there's a new portion of WWW (web APIs) where hypermedia is not that useful.

One big difference is that WWW clients are browsers, which you don't develop yourself. API clients are typically developed by the same team that builds the API.

Losing interoperability is detrimental for WWW (browser wars), but turns out when you are the consumer of your own API, interoperability is not important at all.