The REST paradigm promotes a uniform interface for all interactions between the client and the server. As described earlier, the key abstraction is the resource. A resource is identified by a unique hierarchical name, and can have multiple representations.

The key advantage of such representation is that it provides representation generality for a wide variety of information without having to specify the implementation/type that might not add value (and complicate) the resource definition. This also allows late binding of the reference to a resource representation through content negotiation, thus one client can request a JSON representation of a resource, whereas another can request an XML version.