> That's patently wrong, and ignores basic RESTful standards such as HAL. That's an opinion on the usefulness of HATEOAS. I'm well aware that misguided develop

> That's patently wrong, and ignores basic RESTful standards such as HAL. That's an opinion on the usefulness of HATEOAS. I'm well aware that misguided developers keep inserting HATEAOS where it provides no value. It's just annoying. Realistically, the only useful thing you could do with HATEOAS-style data and an agnostic client is to generate a (rather crappy) UI for an intelligent agent to navigate. This is clearly what Roy Fielding had in mind as well, where I quote from his dissertation: "The name “Representational State Transfer” is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through the application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use." > Just because the word Hypermedia" pops out this does not mean HATEOAD has anything to do with HTML. It may in principle be not specifically tied to XML or JSON or HTML or web browsers, however in practice that's the only domain where it is actually used. Therefore, alternative ways of doing things in that domain are relevant when talking about REST. > You do not manipulate any DOM to "implement interactions". Here I'm talking about how many modern web applications actually work, not how REST works.