I feel like the author has conflated hypertext with html.
The REST interface should be self describing, but that can be done in JSON.
If you go to Roy Fielding's post... there is a comment where someone asks for clarification, and he responds:
> When I say hypertext, I mean the simultaneous presentation of information and controls such that the information becomes the affordance through which the user (or automaton) obtains choices and selects actions. Hypermedia is just an expansion on what text means to include temporal anchors within a media stream; most researchers have dropped the distinction.
> Hypertext does not need to be HTML on a browser. Machines can follow links when they understand the data format and relationship types.
So, to me, a proper format is something like...
id: 1234
url: http://.../1234
name: foo
department: http://.../department/5555
projects: http://.../projects/?user_id=1234
This is hypertext in the sense that I can jump around (even in a browser that renders the urls clickable) to other resources related to this resource.
The REST interface should be self describing, but that can be done in JSON.
If you go to Roy Fielding's post... there is a comment where someone asks for clarification, and he responds:
> When I say hypertext, I mean the simultaneous presentation of information and controls such that the information becomes the affordance through which the user (or automaton) obtains choices and selects actions. Hypermedia is just an expansion on what text means to include temporal anchors within a media stream; most researchers have dropped the distinction.
> Hypertext does not need to be HTML on a browser. Machines can follow links when they understand the data format and relationship types.
So, to me, a proper format is something like...
id: 1234
url: http://.../1234
name: foo
department: http://.../department/5555
projects: http://.../projects/?user_id=1234
This is hypertext in the sense that I can jump around (even in a browser that renders the urls clickable) to other resources related to this resource.