Need For User Involvement vs. General Applicability of Media Types

The greater the variety of use cases is that a media type can be used to realize the greater is the need for user participation in the implementing application. More steady states are necessary because the user agent cannot differentiate the hypermedia semantics.



Media types with more specific hypermedia semantics support more automatic requests on behalf of the user but are less applicable to general use cases.

In this context it is an interesting observation that HTTP Link headers reduce the need for user involvement while not decreasing the general applicability of the entity.