XSLT is easy, even for transforming JSON!
Most developers I talk to will cringe if they hear the acronym XSLT. I suspect that reaction is derived from some past experience where they have seen some horrendously complex XML/XSLT combination. There is certainly lots of that around. However, for certain types of document transformations, XSLT can be a very handy tool and with the right approach, and as long as you avoid edge cases, it can be fairly easy.
Self-descriptive, isn't. Don't assume anything.
With the recent surge of interest in hypermedia APIs I am beginning to see the term “self-descriptive” thrown around quite frequently. Unfortunately, the meaning of self-descriptive is not exactly self-descriptive, leading to misuse of the term.
Distributed Web API discovery
The site apisjson.org defines a specification for creating a document that declares the existence of an API on the web. This document provides some identification information about the API and links to documentation and to the actual API root URL. It also supports pointing to other resources like API design metadata documents and contact information for maintainers of the API.