The proposal is to have a proper, modern web-API built on the CRUD principle using JSON as data-container format. In HTML terms that means using the POST/GET/PUT/DELETE methods that mostly resemble Create, Read, Update and Delete. For more - [RFC-2616](HTTP Method definitions http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616.html#section-9). These are the verbs (actions) that can be executed on nouns -- the objects of interest for us.