Well, strictly speaking if your having to explain the structure of your URLs then it&#x27;s not really fully REST (because of HATEOS) and I don&#x27;t think there is any requirement for a RESTful interface to return JSON.<p>But having said that I&#x27;ve got the point where I don&#x27;t really care - if I can interact with an API from curl without too much difficulty I don&#x27;t care if the API is fully REST or not.