Michael,
In trying to digest all the link traffic (great stuff by the way) - can we perhaps assume that any POST or PUT operation would never destroy links.
POST would never destroy data in any of the three proposals. In the simple approach (called "Another proposal" in the wiki) a PUT request can indeed destroy Links. This is the big disadvantage of that approach. The Thin and Fat Link proposals do not have this problem.
Then, for removal of links, perhaps a separate DELETE call to the resource that specifies (somehow) only the deletion of the listed links is removed?
The problem is, with the simple approach, that you cannot reliable specify which Link to delete. Since a Link in this case is a composition of the Resource and is not a resource in itself there is no unique identifier. What you have is the target URI but there is nothing in the model which prevents you from linking multiple times to the same target. E.g. attaching two virtual interfaces to the same network. Thus you must specify the whole set of Links in every PUT request and any Links not present in that set must be removed by the server. With the Link as a REST resource as in the Thin/Fat Link proposals this is not a problem since the normal CRUD operations are allowed on individual Links. regards, Ralf