These are not particularly good arguments he puts forth here
Would you care to explain why you think they're not particularly good? You're blaming DHH of being "hand wavy" but I don't see any more depth from your comment.
But to specifically address DHH's arguments from the article:
* Enabling Discovery is a strawman argument; no one expects an API to use / as its only documentation (at least no one expects it of a good API).
* Standardizing API Clients is also a strawman; no one expects to have one generic client magically make sense of any API.
* Comparing HAL to WS-* in order to paint it as committee-driven standards bloat is not fair to HAL, which is an admirably tight and cogent specification.
Comments
These are not particularly good arguments he puts forth here
Would you care to explain why you think they're not particularly good? You're blaming DHH of being "hand wavy" but I don't see any more depth from your comment.
I spell out some concrete advantages to hypermedia APIs elsewhere in these comments. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4948652
But to specifically address DHH's arguments from the article:
* Enabling Discovery is a strawman argument; no one expects an API to use / as its only documentation (at least no one expects it of a good API).
* Standardizing API Clients is also a strawman; no one expects to have one generic client magically make sense of any API.
* Comparing HAL to WS-* in order to paint it as committee-driven standards bloat is not fair to HAL, which is an admirably tight and cogent specification.