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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 formatted media (via the anchor tag) to provide self-documented state changes. The difference is that the HTML media type defines this hypermedia feature in its as standard which makes it possible for clients to interpret the hyperlinks automatically. Plain old JSON (as well as XML) does not have any native hypermedia supportdefine 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.

Clients have to be told how to tell the difference between normal text versus hypermedia text for it to be useful.

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