>For better or worse; it's not obvious to me that it was a poor choice. It wasn't a poor choice. It was the least common denominator, and what put it over the

>For better or worse; it's not obvious to me that it was a poor choice. It wasn't a poor choice. It was the least common denominator, and what put it over the top was JSON instead of XML and using URLs for more than the address of the end point to send your RPC to. The problem with SOAP and other APIs of the era was everything was bespoke once you got past transport (and transport often was hard because different systems implemented transport differently). With REST, transport was settled, and at least the URL forced some kind of hierarchy, and you could reason that GET /user/settings would return a settings object for the user.