> That's kind of my point. "Use BEST Practices" is nothing more than a set of guidelines (...) I think you're missing the whole point. REST refers to a specif

> That's kind of my point. "Use BEST Practices" is nothing more than a set of guidelines (...) I think you're missing the whole point. REST refers to a specific architecture style which comprises a set of very specific design criteria which are explicitly and very clearly specified in a doctoral dissertation. The term REST is a term that was coined to refer to that very specific set of design criteria once applied as a whole. Not in part, not as a cherry-picked assortment of choices, but as a whole. So no, the term doesn't apply to a loose set of guidelines which some guy decided to use just because. It would be like stating you're using HTTP just because you set up a protocol that does request-response and might have support for annotations passed as.key:value pairs resembling headers, buy at the same time had no verbs.