I don't know why we have to do so much navel-gazing on this topic. REST is just a loose set of guidelines for invoking operations on, and exchanging data with a

I don't know why we have to do so much navel-gazing on this topic. REST is just a loose set of guidelines for invoking operations on, and exchanging data with a remote server in a more or less stateless fashion. If json works, use it. If xml or yaml work use one of them. Provide both if you want, and if it turns out that sending back an html snippet is the right thing to do then don't feel like you have to burn your HN t-shirts or something.