Did you know that IIS, you need to tell IIS how to render a JSON file, otherwise you can't read / render it at all? In Apache with PHP, you need to tell the server how to handle REST-based URLs and how to handle PHP, otherwise it will render the content of the PHP files as text and ignore your REST urls. In Tomcat I need to specify via web.xml how to handle REST urls or have a framework intercept all of them to be able to render REST urls. Having to add a few lines in NGINX to allow HTML5 to use proper REST urls seems like ordinary business as usual, servers are meant to be tweaked and not to be kept in stock mode.