I've done the HATEOAS thing as much as possible. Links were rendered in json like the site claims not to do. There is json-ld, of course, but that was just too

I've done the HATEOAS thing as much as possible. Links were rendered in json like the site claims not to do. There is json-ld, of course, but that was just too much, so I didn't bother. Can also do a nice trick of rendering nicely formatted json objects in html with proper links if a browser is requesting html/text. For an extra bonus split the page and render the docs right next to it, too. If application/json is requested, return just json to be consumed by programmatic clients. That said, while it was really nice to learn and navigate the API from the browser that way, none of the programmatic clients ever used the "auto-discovery" feature. They jumped right to the resource the needed and didn't bother with the links. At this point REST is just whatever most popular companies designed and called "REST-ful" is what REST-ful became. As much as Roy wants to claim it's not "pure" enough, the ship has sailed so speak.