You make a good argument but it's unfortunately not in response to anything I'm saying.
I never said hyperview isn't RESTful. In fact, it's probably one of the few examples of a technology that follows the REST principles to the letter you're advocating for and thus why you used it as example.
Yet it's also an example of the lack of necessity of the uniform interface constraint. As the developer of everything in the application, I don't need metadata to describe the resources or self-descriptive messages. It describes everything, I as the developer, would already know. It's pointless.
Regular software clients that aren't "browsers" like hyperview, the self-description metadata don't help there either.
So I guess I'm saying the whole uniform interface constraint is completely misguided for any software that isn't some kind of browser. And then only if that browser is actually meant to be a browser.
OK, then that's the core disagreement: I think the uniform interface and the benefits of a RESTful network architecture are useful even if the software you are using isn't a "browser". In the case of hyperview, a major benefit is that you can update your mobile application without redeploying the client, exactly because of that uniform interface. That's why the creator went with the RESTful approach over a more traditional mobile app network architectures.
There's nothing new about that model; having a client interpret an application from a server is as old as computing itself.
> I think the uniform interface and the benefits of a RESTful network architecture are useful even if the software you are using isn't a "browser".
Except it can't be used for anything other than a "browser" either a real browser or something like hyperview. That's fine but it hardly suggests that it should be necessary.
I never said hyperview isn't RESTful. In fact, it's probably one of the few examples of a technology that follows the REST principles to the letter you're advocating for and thus why you used it as example.
Yet it's also an example of the lack of necessity of the uniform interface constraint. As the developer of everything in the application, I don't need metadata to describe the resources or self-descriptive messages. It describes everything, I as the developer, would already know. It's pointless.
Regular software clients that aren't "browsers" like hyperview, the self-description metadata don't help there either.
So I guess I'm saying the whole uniform interface constraint is completely misguided for any software that isn't some kind of browser. And then only if that browser is actually meant to be a browser.