Increase API Stability by Binding to Protocols and Formats, not URLs and Objects

This post is an excerpt from Mike Amundsen's book "RESTful Web API Patterns and Practices Cookbook" from O'Reilly Media.

An important element to building successful hypermedia-enabled client applications is the work of binding the client to responses. Although programmers might not think about it, whenever we write an API consumer app, we’re creating a b…