> I have full confidence that the authors considered these ideas, not laws.
"The authors" considered hyperlinking to be the one core concept of REST, all the rest is just fluff/transport concerns: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte... (that's the bloke who wrote the original REST paper).
That's like saying the authors of the word "bicycle" considered it being two wheeled idea, not law, and you'll call your 8-wheeled ATV a bicycle because it has wheels and you think wheels are nice and solve your problem and the religion department is down the corridor.
Yeah wheels are nice and solve your problem, your motorised monstrosity is not a bicycle though.
To my mind the benefit of REST purism was that it killed SOAP. A similar thing has happened at other stages of tech development (e.g. CSS purism cured us of all those awful <table> excesses).
The purism was a mistake and the details were wrong but it was necessary to get everyone behind a common goal - getting rid of something worse.