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The Website Specification

specification.website

11–20 of 236 posts

Re: The Website Specification

#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 will be intentionally ignored.)

Re: The Website Specification

#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.

Re: The Website Specification

#13
post #5

Hmm wondering how common some of these are ... I'd love /.well-known/change-password but it looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/.well-known/change-password and google.com/.well-known/change-password don't seem to be implemented?

security.txt is always under this folder for sites if it exists, it's also used by letsencrypt for certs or renewals fail

Re: The Website Specification

#14
What a great resource. As someone who’s been making websites for 30 years, it’s amazing to still be picking up some of the basics. Though to be fair many of these didn’t exist back then.

I’ll be using this to add some extra tags to my pages.

It looks like there are some features noted as “required” that are actually required by the spec (e.g. a title tag), and others that are required by opinion (e.g. https) so there’s an element^ of pragmatic best practice being recommended.

I find it curious that setting a colour hint for the browser is recommended. I’m one for letting the browser look as vanilla as possible and letting my pages do the talking.

^Pun not intended, blink and you’ll miss it

Re: The Website Specification

#16
post #4

.well-known/security is listed as a prominent example, but is not in the well-known category.

It's in the "Security" category. I guess whatever categorization scheme they're using doesn't allow assigning multiple categories per item.

Re: The Website Specification

#18
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…

Yeah, the entire suite of proposed "standards" catering to agents looks like a temporary measure to duct-tape over the limitations and token costs of today's agents. They'll churn as quickly as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI et al. can release new versions of their frontier models.

Re: The Website Specification

#19
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…

With how bloated and ad-ridden websites have become, I'd love the pure text version for us humans - let the agents deal with stuff intended for us. But I also have my doubts we'll see that.

Regarding the bad actors point, that's been possible for a long time - e.g. serving up different content for search engine crawlers than the user sees when they click through. If I remember correctly, there was a time Google penalised sites that did this.

Re: The Website Specification

#20
Having such a list is great. I am all for such lists.

BUT

Some people memorize these things. Take them too seriously. You are thought stupid if you don't know them. Somewhere someone then makes a story on Jira to verify that your product does all of these things and you have to convince them that we are fine without them or we don't need all of them etc.

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