A Difficult Abstraction

This paper describe some of what the developers of generalized Web systems have to deal with, assuming they take the specifications at face value. The author believe that the developer community is generally overloaded with what they see, leading to workarounds and simplifications that encourage the development of systems that are inconsistent with underlying specifications. Although there\´s been an upsurge in the development of specification-friendly "restful" systems (that is, those that treat HTTP as an interface rather than just a transport), barriers still exist to taking the Web further into a generalized Web of data and developing significantly more useful services.