draft-kelly-json-hal-05 – JSON Hypertext Application Language
There is an emergence of non-HTML HTTP applications (“Web APIs”) which use hyperlinks to direct clients around their resources.
The JSON Hypertext Application Language (HAL) is a standard which establishes conventions for expressing hypermedia controls, such as links, with JSON [RFC4627]. HAL is a generic media type with which Web APIs can be developed and exposed as series of links. Clients of these APIs can select links by their link relation type and traverse them in order to progress through the application.
HAL’s conventions result in a uniform interface for serving and consuming hypermedia, enabling the creation of general-purpose libraries that can be re-used on any API utilising HAL.
The primary design goals of HAL are generality and simplicity. HAL can be applied to many different domains, and imposes the minimal amount of structure necessary to cover the key requirements of a hypermedia Web API