It's a valiant effort but as someone who has dealt with unraveling a strict API built with SOAP I am going to pass. If I want something standardized I will use a schema based solution such as protobuf. It's already a quasi standard, has clients in many languages and is a binary protocol.

We also should not confuse an API with a transport protocol. I will tilt my hat to this not being as verbose as past attempts, but why reinvent the wheel yet again? It's not like prior attempts didn't function as expected - they did - but we in the industry chastised them for being too strict.

Let's work on improving the semantics and documentation around what constitutes an API. Swagger is an excellent example of this.