Yeah, it's most definitely a solution in search of a problem -- although in this case the solution is an RFC from 1999. I wish we could take HTTP at its word, b

Yeah, it's most definitely a solution in search of a problem -- although in this case the solution is an RFC from 1999. I wish we could take HTTP at its word, but maybe that's too much to ask in this wild world of recalcitrant proxies and buggy browsers. Like you pointed out, this header business doesn't let you do anything you theoretically couldn't do with query params, but the headers feel more in the spirit of HTTP. Like we already do this for downloading parts of big files, and why do we do things a different way for downloading parts of big lists? Parsimony and all that. As far as violating HATEOAS, I feel like headers are a first class citizen of HTTP state. Because browsers have historically been such horrible user agents they have conditioned us to forget that headers are as much a part of requests as urls, ports, and protocols.The only janky thing is my introduction of the extension relation type "items." http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc5988#section-4.2 http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc5988#section-4.2