Most RESTful APIs aren’t really RESTful | Florian Krämer

Fielding’s rules emphasize that a truly RESTful API should embrace hypermedia (HATEOAS) as the central mechanism for interaction, not just use HTTP as a transport. REST is protocol-independent at its core; HTTP is simply a convenient way of using it. Clients should discover and navigate resources dynamically through links and standardized relations embedded in representations — not rely on hardcoded URI structures, types, or external documentation. This makes REST systems loosely coupled, evolvable, and aligned with how the web itself operates: through representation, discovery, and transitions. REST isn’t about exposing your internal object model over HTTP — it’s about building distributed systems that behave like the web.