[cemerick]

Hi, author here.

APIs already necessitate the use of "standard sets of data models", except such "standardization" takes place over and over for each provider of a particular type of service. Further, APIs themselves have incompatible changes that flow from their underlying transport mechanisms (changing URLs, etc).

Right now, you're sharing data with "clients" that end up depending upon the particular details of that data and its (probably impoverished) representation. IMO, might as well own up to it and address that instead of thinking that you're building anything other than siloed services that demand a high degree of client-server coupling.

Changing data models is a fact of life. I'd much rather have a data medium that accounted for that from the start than a set of folklore about which services accept which data, and in what formats. "Patching" of extant data is not necessary (though certainly possible, depending on all sorts of factors); things like views are hardly new, and can be leveraged at every level of the system to match old (or new!) shapes of data with services that expect new (or old!) data.

You say that "APIs will become" something. Their defining feature is their manifestation in our programming languages and libraries, not their semantics with regard to the network. Network APIs have been kicking around for 30-40 years, web APIs for 20 years now. I don't think we should expect much new at this point. I'd rather look towards approaches that have something substantial to say about the fundamental problems in question.