A simple example could be the Twitter API's handling for references (URLs/hashtags/at-user mentions) in a tweet [0]. The tweet text is returned in one field, and all references are listed in a different field together with first/last character index within the tweet where that reference was found. You don't need to parse the tweet text yourself, just display it as plain text and insert links where the references say you should.
This isn't some theoretical design. Any native application that uses a binary protocol framework like protobufs over TCP to communicate with the backend will benefit from this approach.
