&gt; You should [...]<p>At least there&#x27;s no namespacing or DTD&#x27;s!<p>JSON plus a loose adherence to REST won out over SOAP&#x2F;XML-RPC&#x2F;WSDL&#x2F;etc because of its simplicity. Services discovery seems to be a solution in search of a problem.<p>Even the simple idea of embedded links, with apologies to Dr. Fielding, seem to be a less critical component of REST than was initially believed, since very few modern REST API&#x27;s actually provide them.