Looking back on this it seems to me that there isn't even a guarantee that our collections will, or should, be homogeneous. Certainly some of them already are not homogeneous (the things a builder built are of different types). I'm going to mark this as won't fix because of this: The type of a collection is 'collection of links', and the type of a dereferenced thing is self describing when returned. Clients that need type data should build that up on top of the wadl, and put safeguards to handle unexpected heterogeneity.
Looking back on this it seems to me that there isn't even a guarantee that our collections will, or should, be homogeneous. Certainly some of them already are not homogeneous (the things a builder built are of different types). I'm going to mark this as won't fix because of this: The type of a collection is 'collection of links', and the type of a dereferenced thing is self describing when returned. Clients that need type data should build that up on top of the wadl, and put safeguards to handle unexpected heterogeneity.