Might be worth exploring if re-using stuff like XLink makes sense and is within keeping of the objective to keep things simple. Probably better to discuss that

Might be worth exploring if re-using stuff like XLink makes sense and is within keeping of the objective to keep things simple. Probably better to discuss that on the google group than here, feel free to join and raise it there. At the moment, it's registered with IANA as application/vnd.hal+xml, although I don't think it makes a huge difference either way at this point time. Element collision is not a big deal as clients should be determining element semantics on a per-resource basis and - importantly - in the context of the link relation leading to it (from either a resource or a link). You will find similarity with other media types like atom and rdf. Basically, it's designed to be more generic than atom and less convoluted than RDF.