Hrm, where abouts in the [spec](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kelly-json-hal-05) does it actually say MUST? This is another part of HAL that I find somewhat ambiguous - as the sentence is talking about CURIEs in the _plural_ sense, and not the _singular_ it makes sense to me the example would be contained in an array:

    The CURIE Syntax [W3C.NOTE-curie-20101216] MAY be used for brevity
    for these URIs.  CURIEs are established within a HAL document via a
    set of Link Objects with the relation type "curies" on the root
    Resource Object.  These links contain a URI Template with the token
    'rel', and are named via the "name" property.

A thought I had previously when a related discussion about links came up as to reuse the _URI flags_ pattern I've used elsewhere to add an "always use arrays" flag, but this feels wrong as well.

A compromising solution I thought of ( which would require updating the API package expose it ) was to introduce a new `Rel` class, which is simply a wrapper around a `String` and a `Boolean` ( rel and expand ) which controls whether a given rel should always be expanded or not.

Adding a namespace would merely use a `new Rel(rel, true)` and links/embeddeds would use `new Rel(rel, false)` for existing behavior, unless called with a `Rel` argument.

This would give the desired result, but not being "CURIE" specific, and allows other people the freedom to control their own representations better - thoughts?