I am generally in agreement that it's best to advocate REST on the merits, but I also think you may be making light of the constant barrage of attacks against the Web architecture through the 90's (with CORBA) and early 2000's (with SOAP) that were defended against by a small core of people, some of whom (Mark Baker) did so at great personal and health expense.
There's a reason people wave the flag - we can't keep arguing complicated topics from first principles if we are ever going to progress.
I think what you're hearing me express is skepticism that the (self-appointed) elite that makes standards or writes dissertations about architecture is in any way the final word on what constitutes the web. Without the hundreds of thousands of crappy applications that actually populate the web, it would be an academic exercise.
Regardless of what the RFC says, the CGI interface that provided the foundation for the original wave of web apps was just a series of getenv()'s. It was absolutely not the case that web developers in 1995 were careful to make sure that they represented state consistently or provided discoverable resources. Then as now, most web applications (and APIs, where they existed) were black boxes with parameters defined by expediency.
Also, even Fielding doesn't claim that RPC interfaces are wrong. He seems to have a much bigger (and more reasonable) problem with people pretending that RPC interfaces are REST. There are plenty of interfaces that make just as much sense in RPC as they would in REST; it's not unlikely that there are plenty of them that make more sense expressed as RPC.
I also don't understand the emotional appeal. CORBA vs. REST isn't a moral issue; people who sacrifice their health to make sure we're not using SOAP have their priorities screwed up.
I would actually think Roy (and the actual elite that built HTTP in the 90s) would agree with you on your first point - he defines REST, but that doesn't define the Web, which is hundreds of thousands of scrappy applications. REST was intended to cover the common case of the Web so that the standards themselves will be optimized to the common case. The "self appointed" elite are wrong to suggest that REST is the Web, but to me it's just as wrong to suggest that REST doesn't provide a useful abstract model of what makes the web work.
Regarding CGI, yeah, it was a hack, and it worked. But look at how website design evolved -- sometimes those websites sucked because they changed URIs all the time breaking bookmarks, search engines, etc. These practices weren't thought of in academic terms, no, but the point is that there was a theory underlying what emergent properties made websites good and popular (stable URIs for example, which led to better search, and bookmarking), which led to mainstream aphorisms like "cool URIs don't change" in the 97-98 timeframe. This was eventually codified academically in Roy's thesis a few years later. My point is that this wasn't completely accidental, there were people actively advocating "good practices" in the 90s, even without a formal published theory - it was informally understood by those who were on the mailing lists.
And I agree, RPC isn't wrong, the point is that it is fundamentally flawed approach if your goal is interoperability at a global scale. If you want client A to talk to server B, have at it, just don't call it REST or assume you'll get the desirable properties. Many so-called REST APIs aren't globally interoperable due to this conceptual baggage, but some are better than others.
As for the emotional appeal, my point is... these debates have been discussed ad nauseam for nearly 15 years, with many cases involving personal sacrifice (justified or not). Debating on the merits is fine, but having ot go back to first principles every 5 years for a new generation means we are just spinning our wheels. That's why there often is appeal to history or authority. i.e. "Read the mailing lists, they're archived", etc. That's not a great situation, I admit. But most new technologies have traditionally had a "vendor engine" behind them pushing marketing, training, books, etc. to perpetuate the meme. That seems to be less common with the open source / internet vendor world, or maybe it's just that REST is still too new and misunderstood.
All of the elements he describes in the thesis were deployed by 1994 and codified in the first internet draft for HTTP 1.0: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-fielding-http-spec-00
I am generally in agreement that it's best to advocate REST on the merits, but I also think you may be making light of the constant barrage of attacks against the Web architecture through the 90's (with CORBA) and early 2000's (with SOAP) that were defended against by a small core of people, some of whom (Mark Baker) did so at great personal and health expense.
There's a reason people wave the flag - we can't keep arguing complicated topics from first principles if we are ever going to progress.