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The RESTful way to solve such problems is not just by better conventions, but by conventions standardized by the appropriate media types. E.g., the REST service may define a

  Content-Type: application/vnd.acme-json-with-paged-hrefs

that means that all "href" properties are URIs that may be paged by appending "?page=NNN" to them. If both server and the client understand this content-type, the representation may omit the "rel:" part from the parent example altogether.

Constructing arbitrary URIs by the client is not RESTful; however in this case it's the server-side that is in control of URI generation mechanism (it could serve a different representation, with a different Content-Type:, if it chooses to) -- thus it's perfectly valid from the REST point of view.

This is the same story as with the HTML <form> element. It also allows client to construct URIs by the specific rules known to both sides -- because the rules are defined by the appropriate standards about text/html.