even more semantic manifestation expand our conceptual space What exactly does all of that mean? REST is just a subprotocol of HTTP. It does add some guarantee

even more semantic manifestation expand our conceptual space What exactly does all of that mean? REST is just a subprotocol of HTTP. It does add some guarantees about server behavior, but it does not make chunks of JSON any more semantic than if they were served over FTP. The simplest example of why HTML is semantic (and the underlying benefits) is the very textarea I'm writing this in. I can resize it to accommodate larger messages I'm typing. It does spell-checking. The functionality was developed once and now benefits thousands of people visiting thousands of websites. Moreover, I can rely on it and control it. All of this thanks to semantic difference between textarea and some random div. This wouldn't be possible with some random JSON format or custom JavaScript control.