Efforts like the Hypertext Application Language (HAL) [1] are attempts to implement HATEOAS. The point that's often missed in casual discussions of REST is tha

Efforts like the Hypertext Application Language (HAL) [1] are attempts to implement HATEOAS. The point that's often missed in casual discussions of REST is that 'link relations' are extremely important, because they represent well-specified ways of relating one resource to another. They are as critical to REST as mediatypes (MIME types) are. In the graph theory sense, link relations are the label on an edge, URIs are the nodes, and mediatypes are formats that can be used as concrete representations of the nodes. The IANA maintains a Link Relations registry [2]. [1] http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html [2] http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.xhtml http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relation...