> Over time people decided that for their purposes Fielding's requirement of HATEOAS was unnecessary. I wouldn't say Fielding was wrong, but instead that others

> Over time people decided that for their purposes Fielding's requirement of HATEOAS was unnecessary. I wouldn't say Fielding was wrong, but instead that others had different ideas of what was more important to them. I mean, I think you kind of are saying he was wrong? Fielding was pretty clear about some specific principles, and "RESTful" APIs have abandoned all of them. > I would much rather use a REST interface than a SOAP interface I've never used an actual REST API, and I wonder if you have either. Considering much of my day job is literally writing integrations for third party APIs, you'd think I'd have stumbled across one at least once if they existed in the wild, right? In any case, I certainly don't know if I'd rather use one over SOAP; they sound very cumbersome for usage in an API. I do know I'd rather use a simple HTTP + JSON based API of the sort often called "RESTful" than SOAP, but that's quite a different statement!