> I think at this point that ship has sailed.

If you were talking about TCP/IP, then perhaps - because much of the internet's infrastructure is hard-coded (even burned into silicon) to use current standards. But application semantics aren't frozen in stone by any means.

Servers and clients built atop HTTP are still being written. Why not adopt better patterns that apply properly separate semantics for each layer?

I liked the REST ideas when they came out, particularly because they provided a much better and simpler alternative to SOAP. But I think improving patterns where we can is always a good idea.