Yet another retcon of REST that never once mentions MIME types, and thus missed the point. All this gobbledygook about HTML “being REST” is silly and doesn’t m

Yet another retcon of REST that never once mentions MIME types, and thus missed the point. All this gobbledygook about HTML “being REST” is silly and doesn’t match how things were discussed at the time. HATEOAS is delivered by encouraging different resources to have different MIME types, and offering a service document that lets you know what all the resources available are with their associated MIME types. That’s it. It’s really not very complicated, EXCEPT of course that almost no one not intimately involved with the IETF ever bothers defining new MIME types. This is unfortunate! It would be great if everyone would go ahead and document how their resources work, and then maybe we really could deliver on the promise of REST. I do agree that reasonably consistent verbs and paths are pleasant things for folks reading and debugging HTTP traffic, but that’s about all they have to do with REST. But it’s unfortunate we keep getting these explanations that somehow fail to get at the core of the original meaning.