Editing REST (section)

== Principle ==
The term ''representational state transfer'' was introduced and defined in 2000 by computer scientist [[Roy Fielding]] in his doctoral dissertation. It means that a server will respond with the representation of a resource (today, it will most often be an [[HTML]] document) and that resource will contain [[hypermedia]] links that can be followed to make the state of the system change. Any such request will in turn receive the representation of a resource, and so on.

An important consequence is that the only identifier that needs to be known is the identifier of the first resource requested, and all other identifiers will be discovered. This means that those identifiers can change without the need to inform the client beforehand and that client and server must be inherently [[loose coupling|loosely coupled]].