That's media types. I was referring to the strings used in content-type, the HTTP header. You obviously need to support some media type, otherwise how would you represent a resource? But you don't need to support the Content-Type header to have HATEOAS.
> That's media types. I was referring to content-type, the HTTP header. You obviously need to support some media type, otherwise how would you represent a resource? But you don't need to support the Content-Type header to have HATEOAS.
If you are doing a REST architecture with a protocol other than HTTP, sure.
But since the Content-Type header is the mechanism by which HTTP communicates media types, and since in-band, rather than out-of-band, communication of resource locations and media types is essential to HATEOAS, the Content-Type header is a pretty important mechanism in HATEOAS when using HTTP.
file document
document: HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode text
You can distinguish between media types without using the Content-Type header or out-of-band communication. In fact, there's a (non-standard) header for preventing some browsers from replacing the Content-Type value with their own guess.
It's obviously useful, especially for distinguishing between similar media types (e.g. JSON document with different schemas), but not necessary for HATEOAS.
