HAL and our deviations

For more information see HAL homepage and HAL RFC draft.

Content-type

The proper content type for HAL documents is application/hal+json. However, to not confuse browsers, our APIs MUST serve the document with content type application/json.

JSON

HAL allows any valid JSON. We apply the following restrictions:

• UTF-8 character encoding is REQUIRED.
• To ensure interoperability member names MUST be unique in each JSON object, see the rfc.

Field names

HAL allows any field name to start with the underscore _ character. We reserve the use of the underscore _ character for standardized field. This means that any field which name starts with an underscore is defined in the HAL specification, or in these guidelines.