> You need some substantial understanding of language and the world to figure out where this link will take you. > <a href="/accounts/12345/close-requests">clo

> You need some substantial understanding of language and the world to figure out where this link will take you. > <a href="/accounts/12345/close-requests">close-requests</a> There's two types of understanding here: a technical understanding of hypermedia behaviours, and a contextual understanding of application domain intents. A hypermedia client doesn't need to understand the latter at all: it only needs the former to be able to present a user with direct context (whether the user can then understand what to do is mostly up to the application designers, but it's outside of the responsibility of the hypermedia client - it's just the messenger here). For example: this is a HTML anchor element (presumably the client has been served a Content-Type: text/html header here to inform it of that) - HTML anchors initiate GET requests to an associated href. In this case the href starts with a / indicating that it is relative to the serving origin. That's the beginning and end of so the hypermedia client needs to know: all self contained, no out-of-band knowledge required. Any further confusion suffered by the user related to financial or English language knowledge is up to domain knowledge of the application and not within the bounds of what HATEOAS does.