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The vain of my existence. APIs are about data structures, relationships and metadata. Give me these things without requiring me to go through your GUI to figure out what goes where. And yes, do come up with use cases for the API. Try and see it from the point of view of someone who does not know the implementation details. It's a very simple concept that for some reason gets lost.

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HAL - Hypertext Application Language

"HAL is a simple format that gives a consistent and easy way to hyperlink between resources in your API. Adopting HAL will make your API explorable, and its documentation easily discoverable from within the API itself. In short, it will make your API easier to work with and therefore more attractive to client developers. APIs that adopt HAL can be easily served and consumed using open source libraries available for most major programming languages. It's also simple enough that you can just deal with it as you would any other JSON."

http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html

Yes, pretty much HAL. I've never seen an API use this in the real world. I integrate with a lot of non-startup APIs and they can barely respond with proper JSON.

Bane, not vain

I typed vain, vein and vane, but not bane. :)

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