Worth reading this: https://twobithistory.org/2020/06/28/rest.html https://twobithistory.org/2020/06/28/rest.html > REST purists often complain, for example, t

Worth reading this: https://twobithistory.org/2020/06/28/rest.html https://twobithistory.org/2020/06/28/rest.html > REST purists often complain, for example, that so-called REST APIs aren’t actually REST APIs because they do not use Hypermedia as The Engine of Application State (HATEOAS). Fielding himself has made this criticism. According to him, a real REST API is supposed to allow you to navigate all its endpoints from a base endpoint by following links. If you think that people are actually out there trying to build REST APIs, then this is a glaring omission—HATEOAS really is fundamental to Fielding’s original conception of REST, especially considering that the “state transfer” in “Representational State Transfer” refers to navigating a state machine using hyperlinks between resources (and not, as many people seem to believe, to transferring resource state over the wire).8 But if you imagine that everyone is just building FIOH [author's acronym for "Fuck It, Overload HTTP"] APIs and advertising them, with a nudge and a wink, as REST APIs, or slightly more honestly as “RESTful” APIs, then of course HATEOAS is unimportant.