[virmundi]

Actually JSON makes it damn near impossible to uniformally implement REST. You need HATEOS. This means that there has to be a semantic of following links in resources. JSON lacks this ability. ATOM or RSS, both XML, have linking. Heck, XML at a language level supports document linking. HTTP + JSON != REST.

[logn]

Interesting. I looked into HATEOAS more and found this link to a PayPal API:

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/paypal-...

I think I'll try to follow Rest better. Anyhow, I still prefer JSON. To me it's a more concise way to explain data, with nice syntax for arrays and maps. I'd rather jump through a few hoops to implement true Rest than try to craft verbose XML schemas for simple things like arrays and maps. ATOM and RSS I think are good for their main use cases but aren't as generic of syntax as JSON.

[icebraining]

That's what JSON-LD and other formats are for. As a mediatype, application/json is certainly useless for REST, but there's nothing wrong with using it as an encoding for more semantically relevant formats.

[jalfresi]

Whilst I agree with you, there is nothing stopping someone defining link structures in JSON documents, coining a new media type e.g. JSON+Link and boom, problem solved.

[virmundi]

Well, I'm responding to you and to your siblings. You're right. You can create a new MIME type and the problem is solved. Fortunately, as the sibling comments pointed out, there is an extension. What I want to see happen is that the JSON + Links becomes a standard. Ideally a W3C. Otherwise we're into the old XKCD comic https://xkcd.com/927/

[deathtrader666]

If you want document linking, doesn't JSON-LD [1] work ?

1 - http://json-ld.org/