If you want to make REST a web API protocol from its current state of loosely gathered recommendations, why not stick to something that already exists and perfo

If you want to make REST a web API protocol from its current state of loosely gathered recommendations, why not stick to something that already exists and performs well? XML-RPC or JSON-RPC are quite good picks. Especially that you'd get plenty of almost-conforming-but-not-quite implementations for this hypothetical REST specification, which would be disastrous for the initiative in the long run.