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In our What is REST? article we introduced an important aspect of the Uniform Interface constraint known as HATEOAS. The concept of HATEOAS borrows the concept of hyperlinks in HTML to provide self-documented state changesoptions for users. The difference is that HTML defines this as a standard which makes it possible for clients to interpret the hyperlinks automatically. Plain old JSON does not define hypermedia in any way. This means any hypermedia included in a JSON object has no self-interpreted meaning. Clients cannot know the difference between a URI that is part of the data model (e.g., a property called companyWebSite) versus a URI that clients can use to navigate to another resource.

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