> REST isn’t about exposing your internal object model over HTTP — it’s about building distributed systems that behave like the web.
I think I finally understand what Fielding is getting at. His REST principles boil down to allowing dynamic discovery of verbs for entities that are typed only by their media types. There's a level of indirection to allow for dynamic discovery. And there's a level of abstraction in saying entities are generic media objects. These two conceptual leaps allow the REST API to be used in a more dynamic, generic way - with benefits at the API level that the other levels of the web stack has ("client decoupling, evolvability, dynamic interaction").
In what context would a user discover parts of a REST API dynamically?
In the simple (albeit niche) case, a UI could populate a list of buttons based on the URIs/verbs that the REST API returns. So the UI would be totally dynamic based on the backend - and so, work pretty generically across REST APIs.
But for a client, UI or otherwise, to make use of a dynamic set of URIs/verbs would require it to either look for a specific keyword (hard coding the intents it can satisfy) or be able to semantically understand the API (which is hard, requires a human).
Oddly, all this stuff is full circle with the AI stuff. The MCP protocol is designed to give AIs text-based descriptions of APIs, so they can reason about how to use them.
The simplest case, and the most common, is that of a browser rendering the HTML response from a website request. The HTML contains the URL links to other APIs that the user can click on. Think of navigating any website.