I think we spend too much time trying to craft beautiful, descriptive URLs, where we should be spending our time crafting beautiful, descriptive responses. We try to make the URL describe to the developer what is being returned, when in reality, this should be dictated by media types and link relations.
Take for instance the example above. Whether the URL is /images/10/view or /images/10.png, the developer has no idea what kind of resource that is without any media types or relations (the file extension != to the media type). In other words, you could use both URLs to return the same exact resource, and the client shouldn't care. You could even change back and forth between those URLs and the client should never flinch.
This is actually a good example. Say you are serving a static PNG file at /images/10.png, linked in your server response (i.e. in some href like above). Say you want to change things up to do some type of logging on how many times the image has been viewed, so you write some code, create a response at /images/10/view, log views, and return the image with an image/png media type. You just did a really big API change and the client didn't have to be changed.
Now if your client was dumber, and was crafting URLs as /images/{id}.png, you would break all of your clients if you did the above changes. This of course is really just the tip of the iceberg of what flexibility HATEOAS can bring.
Take for instance the example above. Whether the URL is /images/10/view or /images/10.png, the developer has no idea what kind of resource that is without any media types or relations (the file extension != to the media type). In other words, you could use both URLs to return the same exact resource, and the client shouldn't care. You could even change back and forth between those URLs and the client should never flinch.
This is actually a good example. Say you are serving a static PNG file at /images/10.png, linked in your server response (i.e. in some href like above). Say you want to change things up to do some type of logging on how many times the image has been viewed, so you write some code, create a response at /images/10/view, log views, and return the image with an image/png media type. You just did a really big API change and the client didn't have to be changed.
Now if your client was dumber, and was crafting URLs as /images/{id}.png, you would break all of your clients if you did the above changes. This of course is really just the tip of the iceberg of what flexibility HATEOAS can bring.