REST - What exactly is meant by Uniform Interface?

Question

Wikipedia has:

Uniform interface

The uniform interface constraint is fundamental to the design of any REST service.[14] The uniform i

Answer 1

Your question is somewhat broad, you seem to be asking for a restatement of the definitions you have. Are you looking for examples or do you not understand somethings specifically stated.

I agree that the line:

These URI's are going to look like each other

is fundamentally wrong. URIs needn't look anything like each other for the Uniform interface constraint to be met. What needs to be present is a uniform way to discover the URIs that identify the resources. This uniform way is unique to each message type, and there must be some agreed upon format. For example in HTML one document resource links to another via a simple tag:

fallback relationship

HTTP servers return html as a text/html resource type which browsers have an agreed upon way of parsing. The anchor tag is the hypermedia control (HATEOAS) that has the unique identifier for the related resource.

The only point that wasn't covered was manipulation. HTML has another awesome example of this, the form tag:

again, browser know how to interpret this meta information to define a representation of the resource acted upon at the URI. Unfortunately HTML only lets you GET and POST for verbs...

more commonly in a JOSN based service, when you retrieve a Person resource, it's easy to manipulate that representation and then PUT or PATCH it right back to it's canonical URL. No pre-existing knowledge of the resource is needed to modify it. Now when we write client code we get all wrapped up with the idea that we do in fact need to know the shape before we consume it...but that really is just to make our parsers efficient and easy. We could make parsers that analyze the semantic meaning of each part of a resource and modify it by interpreting the intent of the modification. IE: a command of make the person 10 years older would parse the resource looking for the age, identify the age, and then add 10 years to that value, then send that resource back to the server. Is it easier to have code that expects the age to be at a JSON path of $.age? absolutely...but it's not specifically necessary.