There are common standards for links. I think you can do reasonably well by supporting 2 or 3, though I'd prefer the world moved to the Link header. The others are html (<link>, <a>) json-hal, jsonld, etc. Regarding the process:
Links include metadata and types (the "rel" attribute). You can think of the full set of given links as an index. To search this index, you scan for reltype first (since that carries semantics and guarantees behavior) then check the other metadata attrs as needed (eg type=text/css). The only knowledge you embed then is published under the reltype specs.
Comments
There are common standards for links. I think you can do reasonably well by supporting 2 or 3, though I'd prefer the world moved to the Link header. The others are html (<link>, <a>) json-hal, jsonld, etc. Regarding the process:
Links include metadata and types (the "rel" attribute). You can think of the full set of given links as an index. To search this index, you scan for reltype first (since that carries semantics and guarantees behavior) then check the other metadata attrs as needed (eg type=text/css). The only knowledge you embed then is published under the reltype specs.