[mbleigh]

Totally agree, the web itself is absolutely HATEOAS, but there was a type of person in the 2000s era who insisted that APIs were not truly RESTful if they weren't also hypermedia APIs, but the only real benefit of those APIs was to enable overly generic API clients that were usually strictly worse than even clumsily tailored custom clients.

The missing piece was having machines that could handle enough ambiguity to "understand" the structure of the API without it needing to be generic to the point of uselessness.

[JimDabell]

> there was a type of person in the 2000s era who insisted that APIs were not truly RESTful if they weren't also hypermedia APIs

The creator of REST, Roy Fielding, literally said this loud and clear:

> REST APIs must be hypertext-driven

> What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the notion that hypertext is a constraint? In other words, if the engine of application state (and hence the API) is not being driven by hypertext, then it cannot be RESTful and cannot be a REST API. Period.

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

I think of all the people in the world, the creator of REST gets to say what is and isn’t REST.

[mbleigh]

Fair, but the person who coins a term generally doesn't ultimately decide how it's going to be used, see vibe coding for a more recent example.

REST API became colloquially defined as "HTTP API with hierarchical URL structure, usually JSON". I wrote about the very phenomenon 15 years ago! https://www.mobomo.com/2010/04/rest-isnt-what-you-think-it-i...