@evan Not necessarily. If you'd like, I can quickly write a simple AP-server that will return a JSON-serialized inbox Collection with URIs in the "orderedItems" array instead of embedded serialized copies of the object referents. It won't interoperate with typical server implementations (Vocata is one exception), although AFAIK it would be conformant with AP/AS2. But again, this is conflating serialization with whatever abstract data model underlies it.