How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST In the essay “How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST?“1 the author advocates for what he explains as the original notion of REST output, as distinct from HTTP requests. He probably favors XML, too, for its self-documenting features. This article immediately ran counter to my principles, though: in particular, by combining data and display he runs counter to the separation of content and display that has made CSS good.