[spopejoy]

It seems to me this standard is only really useful for APIs to be consumed by a specific GUI or GUI framework, as opposed to "data-centered" APIs that exist to provide access to a particular dataset for myriad purposes. Having a "links" section makes no sense in the latter case -- that's what docs/Swagger/RAML are for.

My stab at imposing some consistency on data APIs boils down to a header and a data section. The header's utility is in describing the data, most obvious utility comes from including a "count: 235" or paging data.

Less-obvious is having self-describing data, namely including the path and query parameters in the header, so you could ingest the data sans request and still know what it represents.

But it's a little bikesheddy, and that might be that data-only APIs are so freaking simple that no standard is really necessary. If so, I must question writing a standard around how we happen to build GUIs today as it seems doomed to SOAPy failure. But hey I'm not "full-stack" ...