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Comment by sharifhsn | Hacker News Reader

It is not technically REST, but it is basically REST. The alternative to a server endpoint is JSON-RPC over stdin which has the same request/response format as REST. This is exactly the point about over-complicating it by saying "it's not REST, it's not JSON-RPC". It's a JSON request/response protocol with a defined format.

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REST !== JSON-RPC

https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypert...

See also the discussion in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507076

Particularly this subthread which was my moment of enlightenment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507991. A truly restful API isn't for a program to consume, it's for _you_, the user to consume through your user agent. Clicking on links is a hypermedia driven, restful api.

I think I saw a comment somewhere by the htmx dev, that Fielding was just giving a name to how the web already was at the time, hyperlinks rendered by a browser that you can navigate in a stateless way to get things done without the user agent being coupled to the sites themselves. It makes sense when you view it as backward-looking academic analysis rather than practical prescriptive advice.

But once you have that defined you can talk about whether things are more or less restful. That's separate from whether something being "more restful" is even good or desired though.

Yeah, it's Fielding's Ph.D. thesis where he's expounding on his work on HTTP 1.0 and 1.1. He's literally just explaining how the web works. It's pretty crazy how much people have misinterpreted it.

> It is not technically REST, but it is basically REST.

What does that even mean?

> the same request/response format as REST

What request/response format does REST have?

Do you even know what HATEOAS means?

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