Your Web browser is probably the best example. When you visit a Web site, your browser discovers resources and understands how it can interact with them.
It certainly does not. Sure it can crawl links, but the browser doesn't understand the meaning of the pages, nor can it intelligently fill out forms. It is the user that can hopefully divine how to interact with the pages you serve their browser.
Most APIs however are intended to be consumed by another service, not by a human manually interpreting the responses and picking the next action from a set of action links. HATEOS is mostly pointless.
Most APIs however are intended to be consumed by another service, not by a human manually interpreting the responses and picking the next action from a set of action links. HATEOS is mostly pointless.