I agree that most clients don't have that sort of semantic understanding. that's because we are still at a stage where most of our APIs are just custom media t

I agree that most clients don't have that sort of semantic understanding. that's because we are still at a stage where most of our APIs are just custom media types and a moderate improvement over yesteryear's WSDL. The improvement is the use of URIs and HTTP GET to mash data. But the point of HATEOAS is that it doesn't have to be this way. The number of generic link relations are increasing, as are the numbers of useful generic media types. We are getting smarter, as an industry, with how to describe semantics in a machine readable way. It's a slow process because building generic designs is really hard. Today's HATEOAS advocates are trying to progress the state of the art, I can completely understand why a individual API author might ignore that constraint though. Perhaps it's futile but I'm not certain our future 10+ years out is eternally building hard coded mashups.