This is a good point that we discussed, too. While Hal, like HATEOAS is very interesting and definitely a simplification that's necessary to make our lives better, we're aiming at something different: we're trying to describe existing (ReST) APIs in a way that a single library using a Factory Pattern can turn into connections that you as a developer can use to work with that API. We settled for the swagger format, because its very flexible, human-readable and honestly can be turned into very nice looking documentation pages.