One thing that's always bugged me (in a small way) about REST is that proponents/experts always insist that REST does not rely on any specific protocol (HTTP) b

One thing that's always bugged me (in a small way) about REST is that proponents/experts always insist that REST does not rely on any specific protocol (HTTP) but all discussions of REST carry a very strong assumption that specific actions are mapped to specific HTTP verbs. For example, Martin Fowler's doctor appointment scheduling example gives you "discoverable" hypermedia links for canceling and editing appointments, but they use the same URI and there is an implicit assumption that the client knows how to distinguish between the two by choosing the appropriate HTTP verb. It just seems kind of strange to say, well, REST isn't tied to HTTP, it's tied to any request/response protocol where each request is bound to a specific URI and one of these core HTTP verbs. Wouldn't implementing REST on any other protocol look an awful lot like tunneling HTTP over that protocol? Another small gripe is the notion that a REST client need not have URIs to specific resources/actions hardcoded in them. The fact that you don't hardcode the specific URIs but rather a bunch of link strings that you then use to look up URIs makes this a lot less interesting. The way it's described generally makes it sound as if there is some kind of magical mechanism by which a client actually learns of the existence of a given endpoint, which would truly be magical. Really, all that's happening is that a client knows a name for a specific endpoint that it's looking for, and the API provides a way to look up the specific URI for that endpoint. Makes things tidy, but it doesn't seem like a feature that has much practical impact if you follow a "URIs shouldn't change" philosophy anyway.