Who understands the links?

Stefan considered that

as long as Web services don’t actually add something more to the Web than a single endpoint per service, they are not “on the Web”, but are indeed dead ends.

in the post of Links are for Humans Only? I Don't Think So.

I agree with his opinion. And it reminders me a question appearing in my mind last night. Why is it more difficult to collect the visit statistics of an XML feed than the web page of the same resource when there is no mean to access the server log? For web pages, just a snippet of script can make the visit recorded by a service on the web. But we cannot put the script in XML feeds, because the feed readers will do nothing about the script. In fact, the web browsers automate this browser to machine interaction described by the script.

If the scripts are removed from web pages, then what left are those for representation in web browsers. The links are among those representations. So who understands the links? Here is a paragraph from Fielding's paper:

Semantics are a byproduct of the act of assigning resource identifiers and populating those resources with representations. At no time whatsoever do the server or client software need to know or understand the meaning of a URI—they merely act as a conduit through which the creator of a resource (a human naming authority) can associate representations with the semantics identified by the URI. In other words, there are no resources on the server; just mechanisms that supply answers across an abstract interface defined by resources. It may seem odd, but this is the essence of what makes the Web work across so many different implementations.

For sure, the human can understand the links. However, they may be cheated by what they see on the page. They need to take the risk by clicking them. The web applications can also try to understand the links, although they do not need to. This needs special prescript of their functions. As Stefan pointed out, this can also be done in XML for machine to machine interaction, e.g. Atom publishing. The condition is that the application accessing the XML knows Atom protocol. Similarly, the web services supporting WS-Addressing is not dead ends, they can reply with 'links' to other services. Again, the condition is that the service consumers know WS-Addressing.