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The Website Specification

specification.website

121–130 of 236 posts

Re: The Website Specification

#121
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 m…

If you have an "agent ready" site, will humans even use it? Why would they visit your site if an AI can just scrape it or MCP it or whatever with a 10 foot pole, while their human sits in ChatGPT/Claude and waits for the results? You might as well just build an API or CLI instead of a website and skip the ceremony.

Re: The Website Specification

#122

Let’s look at the Git history: https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commits/mai... Yeah, mostly slop. I wonder why the slop slingers never disable Claude's self-attribution, and are too lazy to commit themselves, are they proud that they're delegating everything to a slop machine?

If you're going to slop something together, why not mark it as such? I appreciate marked slop much more than hidden slop.

[dead]

Re: The Website Specification

#123
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't have a form with just a login email and force the user to click to enter the password This is required for any non trivial auth system though. You not know until the user is submitted if that user has a password or is using something else.

So what if we don't know? We can find out at the same time. We're trying to authenticate a pair: user/pass.

There is no pair for the enterprise users signing in with their company's SSO or those using Passkey.

I think what some sites do is have a visually hidden, not required password field that a password manager can fill in. If it's not a password-based auth, the flow goes to the next step but if it is, it reveals the password field which may already be filled in.

Re: The Website Specification

#125

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.

Its apparently pure ai slop, I use https://tropes.fyi/vetter

I tried this just now on a landing page for an app that I wrote over a decade ago and it told me it was pure AI slop lol

Re: The Website Specification

#126
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what if we don't know? We can find out at the same time. We're trying to authenticate a pair: user/pass.

There is no pair for the enterprise users signing in with their company's SSO or those using Passkey. I think what some sites do is have a visually hidden, not required password field that a password manager can fill in. If it's not a password-based auth, the flow goes to the next step but if it is, it reveals the password field which may already be filled in.

Aren't you leaking that there's an account with that email that has a non-password auth method if you treat them differently?

Re: The Website Specification

#127
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 miss the days of Flash. Not because I want to actually use it, but because it being an extension forced most websites to offer a basic HTML4 version as well as a fancy, more opaque Flash one. After the advent of HTML5 almost all websites feel like Flash on steroids. Ditto for the IE6 holdovers.

That was the exception, the norm was definitely just a page that said, "Your browser does not support flash"

Re: The Website Specification

#128
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" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. I was going to counter that, but thinking some more, I actually agree, but for slightly different reasons. > not because agents won't be a relevant thing, (...) but because (...) 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…

> most of the parties operating web sites are themselves bad actors

Wait, what? “Most” by percentage of people who operate at least one website, or by percentage of websites that are “bad”? The latter maaaybe, given auto-generated web spam (“words-with-seven-letters-and-2-ms.html”)?

But to the extent some hotels, airlines, retailers, etc, decide they don’t want my agent and will only sell to me if I personally drive the web browser… sorry, my agent will shop elsewhere.

Economics change, since an agent can comparison shop exhaustively in a way I can’t, but at the end of the day I expect the accountants device that any sale is better than no sale.

Re: The Website Specification

#129
post #46
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…

Me too!

Re: The Website Specification

#130
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.

Table designs were kinda brilliant though, both in how easy they were to create[1], but also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser. Given context of the table in front of you, you can generally piece together where on the screen the information goes without rendering anything. You can generally do a lot of the same things with CSS grid layouts, but it's 100x more complicated, and th…

also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser.

Or even a regular expression.

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