[mcdonc]

It's not splitting hairs at all. It's the definition of the pattern. The pattern was created for stateful UI systems, and it can't be emulated with request-response frameworks without UI state kept on the client side.

But that said, the fact that Rails (and Pylons, etc) called themselves MVC has rendered any definition meaningless, so it just kind of doesn't matter. Truth be told, it was already getting there long before web frameworks entered the picture when Java coopted the term to mean something it didn't in the 90s.

I prefer to use different terminology to avoid confusion, but if you wanna keep using "MVC" for your own stuff, I'm not going to fight city hall.