How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

The client knows nothing about the API end points associated with this data, except via URLs and hypermedia controls (links and forms) discoverable within the HTML itself. If the state of the resource changes such that the allowable actions available on that resource change (for example, if the account goes into overdraft) then the HTML response would change to show the new set of actions available. If the client knows nothing about the meaning of the responses, it cannot do…

This essay is great. I can see from the first comments that its point is entirely lost. Which is too bad; the core idea of Representational State Transfer is interesting and deserves to be respected separate from "HTTP but not SOAP". I built some of Google's first public APIs and we used SOAP, to match the onion on our belts. It never worked very well. I'm real glad that JSON over HTTP and other forms of RPC succeeded where SOAP…

Before REST gained mind share, developing for the web was effectively templating. Vanilla PHP, Java server pages, Django, Rails, etc all had this idea that business logic would be transformed server-side into complete web pages by injecting variables into HTML. REST came along and tried to put some discipline around this. The URLs now mattered and had semantic meaning! All the self-describing hypertext stuff was interesting but largely ignored. That one point - giving URLs noun-like semantics - led to…