tl;dr

Render one hypermedia type for your human consumers (HTML) and another hypermedia type for your machine consumers (HAL). Conneg (see HTTP’s Accept, Content-Type, Vary headers) should be relatively easy to leverage for this with a decent development stack.

Why?

Clearly the hypermedia API for you application will have parallels with your HTML application, but the interface you are presenting to machines needs to account for their automated behaviour in an entirely different manner. Machines are not adaptable consumers, so the machine interface to your application needs to be carefully managed so that it exposes the minimum ‘attack surface’ against which developers can write coupled client code.

Mixing your human and machine affordances in one HTML interface results in a messy, broad attack surface and is therefore not a good strategy for sustaining the evolvability of your application.

How that might look in practice..

If you use HTML for *both* human and machine interactions , you will actually end up presenting two competing interfaces to the machine clients, e.g:

<a href=“/people/bob” rel=“author”>author</a>

Is it valid to select the link control in a coded client by the text 'author’ wrapped in the anchor tag or is it only valid to select via the @rel attribute? It’s not immediately apparent from the media type, and that’s one example of the kind of tax you place on consumers by using a muddy’d interface like HTML. What happens if one of your developers decides the page looks better if you change author to Author?

Machine hypermedia requires a much lighter interface than human hypermedia does. Forms sound good in theory but have a much lower cost-benefit when the run-time consumers of the application are automatons. Also, it’s not unlikely that machine clients will be written against your API that 'cheat’ on the full processing rules for forms, which means when you change @method from POST to GET.. many of those external clients bomb out. This is more likely to happen as the complexity of the affordance goes up.

a few other thoughts..

There’s also a few subjective reasons HTML is considered 'not very nice’:

HTML is not at all elegant for representing data. Querying the DOM, even with css selectors, feels clunky in comparison to traversing a JSON object. 

I’m not sure the hypermedia affordances of HTML are that rich when it comes to machines, either: for example, there’s no clean way of representing the embedded'ness/containment of another resource’s state with HTML.