(Replying to PARENT post)

JSON certainly isn't incompatible with HATEOAS in theory, but we have enough observational evidence at this point to conclude that it will not be used in practice, on any meaningful scale.

From the article:

HATEOAS is a constraint of the REST application architecture that distinguishes it from most other network application architectures.

The is the under-appreciated aspect of regular old HTML is that it satisfies this requirement, and that makes HTML-based applications fundamentally different than (nearly all) JSON-based applications.

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(Replying to PARENT post)

I certainly don't under-appreciate HTML. I was there at the University of Minnesota when the WWW appeared in our Gopher and set the world on fire, and I've made a career out of it ever since.

But the magic of HTML is in the browser where you click around. Having a standard for form equivalents and links in a JSON API doesn't pack the same punch because there is little purpose to have freeform consumption of an API the same way that we have freeform consumption of web pages by humans. In theory I understand that tools could be built around rigid adherence to RESTful principles, and that this could allow some sort of usage without out-of-band documentation, but REST principles per se are not a specification for something that you can build tooling against. For that purpose I feel efforts like JSON-API (http://jsonapi.org) are doing an admirable job, and whether it is technically RESTful seems like a minor footnote compared to whether it's making good decisions that A) prevent bikeshedding and B) enable better tooling.

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