Formal specs[0][1][2][3] have existed for years, not necessarily from the W3C. All of them suffer from a chicken or egg problem. Without servers following spec

Formal specs[0][1][2][3] have existed for years, not necessarily from the W3C. All of them suffer from a chicken or egg problem. Without servers following specs, there won't be clients. Without spec-based clients, servers will continue to serve ad hoc formats. Actually it is kind of a miracle that the web was standardized around HTML and not thousands of competing markup formats. We have JSON as a defacto standard for a machine format, but it lacks semantics, which is where JSON-LD comes into play. I have not actually seen an API using JSON-LD in the wild, but it looks promising and is a W3C recommendation. The spec says nothing about building APIs and it looks kind of ugly with all of its @ prefixes, which is where Micro API[2] comes into play. [0] http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html [1] http://www.hydra-cg.com/ http://www.hydra-cg.com/ [2] http://micro-api.org/ http://micro-api.org/ [3] I did not include JSON API, since it does not make hypermedia a requirement.