First let me say I'm not arguing for XML-RPC. See my actual question at the bottom.<p>One nice thing about protocols like XML-RPC is they're well defined, unlike the somewhat abstract idea of "REST", which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.<p>You end up with lots of different REST API styles created by people of various levels of competence and understanding of what REST is. It makes it harder to create client libraries that handle the mundane aspects of communicating with these APIs.<p>Projects like httparty and rest-client do help somewhat, but they end up injecting their opinion of what the "correct" way to do REST is.<p>So my question is: has there been any effort to codify REST API best practices into a lightweight REST "protocol", such that it would be easy to write generic client libraries, yet still obey the principles of REST?