I've made this argument in a much better form elsewhere but I don't have much time. To my mind the benefit of REST purism was that it killed SOAP. A similar th

I've made this argument in a much better form elsewhere but I don't have much time. To my mind the benefit of REST purism was that it killed SOAP. A similar thing has happened at other stages of tech development (e.g. CSS purism cured us of all those awful <table> excesses). The purism was a mistake and the details were wrong but it was necessary to get everyone behind a common goal - getting rid of something worse.