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HATEOAS could have been the future too - many people wanted it to be.

With all these standards, the successful ones need to find some magic moment to take off - like HTTP did.

Too early to tell if ActivityPub (which I like as a protocol very much) will be an HTTP or an XML.




The reason behind HATEOAS was that REST was in practice being watered down from how it was originally envisioned, so proponents of the original vision needed a new term.

I don't think that your origin story being "well we needed a way to tell all the practitioners they were consistently doing it wrong" is a good indicator of potential success.


Ok, perhaps I picked a poor example - but still, the success of a standard depends on some magic formula that isn't easy to repeat.


What happend with all these Hypermedia ideas? All these HATEOAS, Hydra, HAL, etc. projects don't appear to me as very widespread.


Well the purists lost is my take. The vision was a fine one, just the approach that was being proposed had too many downsides to really take off.




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