REST has won a lot of mindshare over the past few years, but most of the progress has been of the "stop hitting yourself with a hammer" variety. In stripping away unnecessary complexity, we've abandoned the idea that web services can do complicated things. Today's web services serve JSON, a format designed to represent simple data structures. The JSON is typically consumed by XMLHTTPRequest, a client that's older than the Fielding thesis.

In this talk I'll frame hypermedia links and forms ("instructions" from the server to the client) as the next step. Clients that can follow instructions are easier to reuse and can support complex behavior without breaking the brains of client developers. I'll give a tour of recent work in this field and try to explain why existing  standards haven't caught on. I'll also take a guess at how much of the work of following instructions we can reasonably automate.