"Schema" is also foreign to REST. That is also a requirement coming from somewhere else.
You're probably coming from a post-GraphQL generation. They introduced this idea of sharing a schema, and influenced a lot of people. That is not, however, a requirement for REST.
State is the important thing. It's in the name, right? Hypermedia as the engine of application state. Not application schema.
It's much simpler than it seems. I can give a common example of a mistake:
GET /account/12345/balance <- Stateless, good (an ID represents the resource, unambiguous URI for that thing)
GET /my/balance <- Stateful, bad (depends on application knowing who's logged in)
In the second example, the concept of resource is being corrupted. It means something from some users, and something to others, depending on state.
In the first example, the hypermedia drives the state. It's in the link (but it can be on form data, or negotiation, for example, as long as it is stateless).
There is a little bit more to it, and it goes beyond URI design, but that's the gist of it.
It's really simple and not that academical as it seems.
Fielding's work is more a historical formalisation where he derives this notion from first principles. He kind of proves that this is a great style for networking architectures. If you read it, you understand how it can be performant, scalable, fast, etc, by principle. Most of the dissertation is just that.
"Schema" is also foreign to REST. That is also a requirement coming from somewhere else.
You're probably coming from a post-GraphQL generation. They introduced this idea of sharing a schema, and influenced a lot of people. That is not, however, a requirement for REST.
State is the important thing. It's in the name, right? Hypermedia as the engine of application state. Not application schema.
It's much simpler than it seems. I can give a common example of a mistake:
GET /account/12345/balance <- Stateless, good (an ID represents the resource, unambiguous URI for that thing)
GET /my/balance <- Stateful, bad (depends on application knowing who's logged in)
In the second example, the concept of resource is being corrupted. It means something from some users, and something to others, depending on state.
In the first example, the hypermedia drives the state. It's in the link (but it can be on form data, or negotiation, for example, as long as it is stateless).
There is a little bit more to it, and it goes beyond URI design, but that's the gist of it.
It's really simple and not that academical as it seems.
Fielding's work is more a historical formalisation where he derives this notion from first principles. He kind of proves that this is a great style for networking architectures. If you read it, you understand how it can be performant, scalable, fast, etc, by principle. Most of the dissertation is just that.