Sorry, I don't get what you're responding to. Browsers don't understand hypermedia APIs (or even HAL)--they only grok HTML.
HTML is a hypermedia media type. A server spits it out, the client (a browser) consumes it.
A browser is a generic hypermedia API client, for services that expose HTML.
> it's not an API in the sense most people understand
Neither are hypermedia APIs in general.