"The problems we're discussing have plagued software interfaces in general, ..." #readingToday  

The challenges in the section above, however, go well beyond REST. The problems we're discussing have plagued software interfaces in general, from the earliest screen-scraping programs to object-oriented APIs to Web Services to today's RESTful APIs. The entire notion of a software interface is an agreement between the people building the software provider and consumer endpoints that the interface behaves a particular way. Loose coupling, after all, relies upon an interface contract that fixes the behavior of the API so that the parties involved can make various decisions about their software under the covers without breaking the interaction. But woe to those who dare to change the contract, or who want to consider metadata the contract knows nothing about!