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The Website Specification

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Re: The Website Specification

#101

Post by carlosjobim »

neya wrote: post #46
Latty wrote: post #11

"Agent Readiness" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. (To be entirely clear, not because agents won't be a relevant thing, although certainly I have my doubts, but because I believe even if they are a relevant thing, requiring special allowances from sites undermines the whole point, and such things will only end up used by bad actors to mismatch what agents see to what humans see, and so…

I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet. Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no rea…

That's called reader mode. You're standing next to a fresh water spring complaining that you are thirsty.

Re: The Website Specification

#102

Post by tanepiper »

I actually thought about this a couple of weeks back that for agents - going backwards actually makes sites more capable - WAP would even be more appropriate. The ultimate irony though is that making websites MORE accessible makes them more agent friendly - the last decade of SPAs is what makes things harder.

Re: The Website Specification

#103

Post by k1m »

fullstackchris wrote: post #76
k1m wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big fan of reader mode. For me, a direction better than llms.txt would be to encourage sites to improve their markup (think semantic web era) so agents could get the text version from that the way reader mode does. Would achieve the same thing - save tokens. This isn't difficult and I think the reason it hasn't been done is that publishers want clicks and ad views. Which begs the question: why would they start doing…

modern agents already do this via content negotiation and will attempt to retrieve the markdown version of a given site https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/markdown-routes-with-next...

But that isn't that different from requesting the llms.txt version. Why not just make it so the useful content you want the LLM to focus on is easily retrievable from the same HTML the user's browser gets?

The sanity.io page writes:

> serving agents a bunch of HTML might just bloat their context window.

That's only true if you assume the the agent can't extract the useful text before it goes into the model as tokens. Your browser's reader mode uses heuristics to identify what the actual content is in a large HTML response and strips away the rest.

To me this is a far better approach than worrying about an llms.txt files or looking at HTTP headers to see if markdown is preferred. Such efforts could easily be directed at ensuring the useful content on your site carries the appropriate markup for an agent or any other tool to extract it. And it would require less work to implement for the publisher of the content.

Re: The Website Specification

#104

Post by gwerbin »

bblb wrote: post #88
selfhoster1312 wrote: post #12

This looks like slop from a slop factory. "SEO", "Agent-readiness". That's precisely what a good website doesn't do (to paraphrase the homepage). Oh yes, it's produced by a Wordpress "SEO" expert and private investor using Claude LLM. What a surprise. A man who built a fortune destroying the internet we loved with advertisement slop now working on destroying whatever's left with LLM slop.

The full spec in single page is like a poster boy for the current AI slop webdev. https://specification.website/llms-full.txt

What do you mean by this? Making the site friendly to AI agents is one of the goals of this project, so why are you surprised that it follows its own recommended practices? That doesn't mean it's an AI slop project.

Re: The Website Specification

#105

Post by xigoi »

rglullis wrote: post #71
yolo3000 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed someone once for a fullstack role, gave him a mockup of a screen we had to build and asked how he would do it, in short some things on top of other things. The only thing he managed to say was how he would divide everything into components. I thought man, so many devs don't even know how to use html/css anymore, but who's laughing now, you just need to prompt a coding agent.

Ha, and I flunked a "Fullstack Developer" interview some years ago because I didn't reach for npm or React to build a page that had a simple form to make a request to the backend.

Dodged a bullet.

Re: The Website Specification

#106

Post by sham1 »

corvus-cornix wrote: post #60
neya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet. Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no rea…

I feel like this comment is channeling https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

While I'm sure people here have seen these, might as well link the rest of them to set how this can be evolved while keeping it small.

- http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/> - https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/> - https://www.thegreatestmotherfucking.website/> - https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/>

And there are probably even more.

Re: The Website Specification

#107

Post by mcmcmc »

Retr0id wrote: post #47
Gigachad wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your website itself is advertising a product or service you sell you would still want LLMs to see and fetch it. If you are a news site, blog, or any other website that doesn’t exist to sell something, you are only harmed by ai agents.

In those situations you wouldn't have ads on the human version of the site either, surely?

Sure, if it’s paywalled. Web hosting isn’t free

Re: The Website Specification

#108

Post by scottswilliams »

Latty wrote: post #11

"Agent Readiness" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. (To be entirely clear, not because agents won't be a relevant thing, although certainly I have my doubts, but because I believe even if they are a relevant thing, requiring special allowances from sites undermines the whole point, and such things will only end up used by bad actors to mismatch what agents see to what humans see, and so…

Agent readiness seems like an entirely helpful step. People aren't using blockchains on my websites but they are using AI, and AI do not need to use websites like humans.

Humans want to see a good-looking website, even just raw HTML. An agent doesn't even need that, ideally they would just see the content of the page in markdown.

Why not have an agent version? It saves the client agent and the website host time and money.

It would be nice if there was a standard like llms.txt to specify "agents should instead visit this mirror of the website that is a raw markdown version of what humans see"

Also, part of agent readiness on this website is the AI equivalent of SEO (or the opposite if you don't want your website being crawled for AI).

Re: The Website Specification

#109

Post by cutler »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #98
cutler wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Responsive design out of the box? Were you actually there? Back in 2000 you could make a career out of scripting browser polyfills or "DHTML".

That doesn't seem relevant to responsive design? HTML and CSS are definitely responsive out of the box, but OTOH I remember how many designers of that era thought responsiveness was a bug and asked devs to add width:920px to body...

CSS, especially the box model, was not consistent across browsers.

Re: The Website Specification

#110

Post by yesbabyyes »

JimDabell wrote: post #84
Kudos wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.

It became feasible to switch to CSS layouts for complex websites and apps in the early 00s. How early depended upon your target demographics and skill set. Lots of people who didn’t want to learn new ways of doing things carried on using table layouts long after browser support demanded it. I was using CSS sparingly from 1999 onwards and ditched table layouts in 2002, but I was ahead of the curve.

Same here, we resigned our site in early 2003 with CSS layout. Late adopters would snicker a bit back then, seeing it as chasing a fad or being too hipster.

Out of all similar situations, where I may have been an early adopter of a technology or method for reasons, using the web platform and following standards has probably been the one I least regret.

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