[jon_moore]

Yep, this is really the point. If we think hypermedia APIs give you evolvability, then we've got to figure out how to do it; we don't have libraries for that sitting around, so someone has to do some work somewhere.

HAL is going for "start with something clean for machines (JSON and XML), layer in hypermedia, get people to adopt it." This seems like a perfectly reasonable approach.

I'm suggesting another approach, which is "start with something that supports hypermedia and is already ubiquitous on the web, and figure out how to get machines to make sense of it."

I'm not sure either one is easy, so it's worth having multiple horses in the race, I think.