> My interpretation is that no one uses REST properly (ie, HATEOAS). Agreed that everyone ignores the HATEOAS clause of REST, even when they call things "RESTf

> My interpretation is that no one uses REST properly (ie, HATEOAS). Agreed that everyone ignores the HATEOAS clause of REST, even when they call things "RESTful", but that's because the HATEOAS clause is tremendously stupid. I don't know why it's so common for narrow-minded intellectuals to decide that the reason the world is so complicated is because nobody has sat down yet and decided to make it simple. No, the world is complicated because reality has a surprising amount of detail [1][2]. When one person (or worse, a committee) sits down and decides "this is the way all of the world's information will be organized from now on" (HATEOAS, the "semantic web", etc.) they envision automated tools that can browse information the way Web Browsers browse the web. But as complicated as HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS, CORS, SVG, and now WebAssembly are, they are dozens of orders of magnitude simpler than "all the information anyone might ever want to make available over an API". Writing hypertext that can be understood by a tool to digest how your API should be consumed is just not possible. It doesn't work for people who are new to the API (they need to read the docs no matter what), and it's useless overhead for the people who use the API all the time (the hypertext is delivered with every request!?) People don't use HATEOAS because HATEOAS is stupid. [1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-... [2] https://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard https://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard