I fully agree. Fielding warns in his dissertation about design by buzzwords himself.
Almost all web APIs out there aren't REST APIs because they don't respect the "driven by hypermedia" constraint which makes sense because this constraint was put in place for human users driving applications through web browsers, not for machines.
Almost all web APIs out there aren't REST APIs because they don't respect the "driven by hypermedia" constraint which makes sense because this constraint was put in place for human users driving applications through web browsers, not for machines.
I've started to formalize a new "Web API" architecture style that takes the best of REST but leaves the requirements and constraints that don't make sense. See this blog post: http://blog.restlet.com/2013/05/02/how-much-rest-should-your...