Is this a reinvention of openapi formerly known as swagger?
WebMCP is available for early preview
141–150 of 226 posts
Re: WebMCP is available for early preview
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAPI is a replacement for web browsing. Mostly for businesses. WebMCP nicely supplements your web browsing.
Explain.
WebMCP is mediated by the browser/page & has the full context of the user's active page/session available to it.
Websites that do offer real APIs usually have them as fairly separate things from the web's interface. So there's this big usability gap, where what you do on the API doesn't show up clearly on the web. If the user is just hitting API endpoints unofficially, it can create even worse unexpected split brain problems!
WebMCP offers something new: programmatic control endpoints that work well with what the user is actually seeing. A carefully crafted API can offer that, but this seamless interoperation of browsing and webmcp programmatic control is a novel very low impedance tie together that I find greatly promising for users, in a way that APIs never were.
And the starting point is far far less technical, which again just reduces that impedance mismatch that is so daunting about APIs.
Re: WebMCP is available for early preview
#143Is this a reinvention of openapi formerly known as swagger?
Swagger / OpenAI is to trigger things in the backend, this is to trigger things in the frontend (which may, in turn, trigger things in the backend).
Re: WebMCP is available for early preview
#144I suspect people will get pretty riled up in the comments. This is fine folks. More people will make their stuff machine-accessible and that's a good thing even if MCP won't last or if it's like VHS -- yes Betamax was better, but VHS pushed home video.
I’m all for making data more machine accessible, but it’s not like there was a shortage of ways to implement that. Hell, if most sites implemented OpenAPI, there’d be no problem to solve. The choice of whether to make one’s service open to mechanical use is a business decision. Imagine a world in which YouTube could easily be accessed by scripts. Google does not want this; they want quite the opposite.
Yes, when I said Betamax I was actually referring to Swagger/OpenAPI. It's been around for a while but it didn't catch on the way MCP did.
What I'm saying is that the AI hype is making people make that business decision, and that is ultimately a good thing because it means more human accessibility. Not just for people with disabilities, but through interoperability and fewer silos like YouTube.
Re: WebMCP is available for early preview
#145Okay, this is interesting. I want my blog/wiki to be generally usable by LLMs and people browsing to them with user agents that are not a web browser, and I want to make it so that this works. I hope it's pretty lightweight. One of the other patterns I've seen (and have now adopted in applications I build) is to have a "Copy to AI" button on each page that generates a short-lived token, a descriptive prompt, and a couple of example `curl` commands that help the machine navigate.
I've got very slightly more detail here https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-03-02/Copy_To_Clau...
I really think I'd love to make all my websites and whatnot very machine-interpretable.
Re: WebMCP is available for early preview
#146Re: WebMCP is available for early preview
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a failed technology for websites.
How is it failed? Just compared to, like, the prevalence of HTML? I've worked in web dev for almost 20 years. Almost every year has had some kind of work with XML.
We are using HTML and not XHTML. I have not used XML on websites in over 15 years when HTML5 got stable.
Re: WebMCP is available for early preview
#148I suspect people will get pretty riled up in the comments. This is fine folks. More people will make their stuff machine-accessible and that's a good thing even if MCP won't last or if it's like VHS -- yes Betamax was better, but VHS pushed home video.
That's what I don't get with AI, isn't it supposed to make us work less? Why do I need to bother making my websites AI friendly now? I thought that was the point of AI, to take something that's already there and extract valuable information. Same with coding. Now I don't get to write code but I get to review code written by AI. So much fun...
AI is not great at browser use at the moment and it's also quite inelegant to force it to. It's one thing if it reads your nicely marked down blog, it's another for it to do my groceries order by clicking around a clunky site and repeatedly taking screenshots. Not to mention how many tokens are burnt up with what could be a simple REST call.
So to answer your first question, it's less about _reading_ and more about _doing_. The interfaces for humans are not always the best interfaces for machines and vice versa in the doing, because we're no longer dealing with text but dynamic UIs. So we can cut out the middle man.
As for coding, Karpathy said it best: there will be a split between those who love to code and those who love to build. I too enjoyed writing code as a craft, and I'll miss doing it for a living and the recognition for being really fast at it, but I can do so much more than I could before now, genuinely. We'll just have to lean more into our joy of building and hand-code on the side. People still painted even after the camera was invented.
Re: WebMCP is available for early preview
#149Browser devs will do literally anything just to not work on WebGPU support.
Re: WebMCP is available for early preview
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want my local dm shop to offer me their product info as copyable markdown, ingredient list, and other health related information. This could be a way to automate it.
Why would you want that over a proper API with structured data?
How does my chatbot use the API if not through MCP?