[jon_moore]

I think it's somewhat of a benefit to make the clients expect to do a little searching to find the data/links/forms they want to use--it makes them a little more robust and adaptable (I guess because they have lowered expectations!). Contrast this to a client dependent on an XML or JSON Schema. Yeah, that client is easy to write, but you've now locked the server into not changing its format or you've doomed the client to break when the server decides to change anyway. I'm shooting for something a little better.

You can't totally decouple the clients; they have to understand in some way the vocabulary the server is using, but you can do a lot to decouple them from the structure of the markup.