[leftnode]

The best example of that is a website. It provides links to other documents. It just happens to be that the output is usually HTML, but there's no reason why JSON or XML can't contain links to other hypermedia as well.

[extension]

Most any document format can contain links, but that doesn't make it hypermedia. You can't make a client that knows what to do with any JSON or XML document.

[leftnode]

Wait, why not? The JSON could return in a standard format that the client knows where to look for links to other documents.

[extension]

Sure, you can design a standard format on top of JSON, but that is rarely done. The whole appeal of it is for passing around ad-hoc data structures.

There are many hypermedia formats built on XML, but when it's just used as a data container for an API, it's not hypermedia.

[leftnode]

Gotcha, that makes sense. Thanks.