Comment by renerick

Htmx essays have already been mentioned, so here are my thoughts on the matter. I feel like to have a productive discussion of REST and HATEOAS, we must first agree on the basics. Repeating my own comment from a couple of weeks ago, H stands for hypermedia, and hypermedia is a type of media, that uses common format for representing some server-driven state and embedding hypermedia controls which are presented by back-end agnostic hypermedia client to a user for discoverability and interaction.

As such, JSON driven APIs can't be REST, since there is no common format for representing hypermedia controls, which means that there's no way to implement hypermedia client which can present those controls to the user and facilitate interactions. Is there such implmentation? Yes, HTML is the hypermedia, <input>s and <button>s are controls and browsers are the clients. REST and HATEOAS is designed for the humans, and trying to somehow combine it with machine-to-machine interaction results in awkward implementations, blurry definitions and overcomplication.

Richardson maturity model is a clear indication of those problems, I see it as an admission of "well, there isn't much practicality in doing proper REST for machine-to-machine comms, but that's fine, you can only do some parts of it and it's still counts". I'm not saying we shouldn't use its ideas, resource-based URLs are nice, using feature of HTTP is reasonable, but under the name REST it leads to constant arguments between the "dissertation" crowd and "the industry has moved on" crowd. The worst/best part is both those crowds are totally right and this argument will continue for as long as we use HTTP