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I'm sorry, but "hypermedia" is a terrible term. You might call a webpage a kind of hypermedia, but web API's accessed via HTTP? That makes no sense at all. Hypermedia is a huge umbrella term which describes content, not a means for sending and retrieving data!

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Steve left out some context regarding what hypermedia API entails. I believe the essence of a hypermedia API is that the client does not construct URLs but instead follows links. Only the server constructs URLs, and the only URL the client should be aware of (that was not generated by the server and delivered in an HTTP response) is the initial URL.

Hyper anything sounds terribly retro to me, circa 1992.

But I agree: it is an uninformative term for anything which merely establishes a connection and sends/receives data as opposed to specifically delivering content.

REST is just fine as it is. It is a well-understood term for what it does. Why reinvent the wheel and stick a new label on it every five minutes?

REST is well understood? The percentage of self-described REST APIs that actually respect its constraints is almost a rounding error.

Well, I'd probably agree with that. There are some truly bizarro API implementations.

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