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The Website Specification
161–170 of 236 posts
Re: The Website Specification
#162"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…
Yeah I’m with you. If the web was still html-driven more than JS-driven, you wouldn’t need to make your site “agent-ready”.
On the same topic, it’s hilarious how much everybody suddenly cares about ergonomics of non-browser software. I have used SO many APIs that are just miserably documented, but now they have magical MCPs!! Which seem like they’re basically well-documented APIs? And suddenly everything needs to have a decent CLI tool because that’s what LLMs are suited for.
Like dang y’all didn’t care when the API was frustrating for me to use!!
Re: The Website Specification
#163Earlier 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.
It's done that way as an overreaction to B2B customers which may want totally isolated per-tenant systems.
Take Okta login for example. Okta wants to offer big hyper-secure customers an option of "if you want, we can run our system in your cloud/data-center/whatever". To support that kind of system, you go to to the https://login.okta.com/ page and enter your email, JUST your email. Okta uses that to look up which customer tenant you belong to, then sends you to customer.okta.com where you enter your password. This way, the password only goes through infra owned by big-customer.
Okta then just builds everything with his indirection so they can move customers to it.
Re: The Website Specification
#164The creative ways most sites break Back/Forward never fails to amaze me
Re: The Website Specification
#165Earlier 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'm doing my part: https://rz01.org/handcrafted-html/
I like… great idea to start with the output of a SSG and then strip away the things you don’t want
Re: The Website Specification
#166This 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.
From the about page ( https://specification.website/about/ ): > Not a framework. Not a guide. A spec — what is required, what is recommended, and what to avoid. It's hard to tell how much of the site is LLM slop, but some of the copy sure is.
I could have clocked this as an LLM generated site from a thousand yards, blindfolded. The gradients, the cards, the punchline-like one liners. So much pomp for essentially a list of best practices for having a website.
Not that it’s a bad idea, I guess? But it’s also like. Somebody else prompted Claude for 20 minutes to think of a list that websites should have, so that now MY Claude doesn’t have to think of it on its own??
Re: The Website Specification
#167Earlier 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…
Yeah I’m with you. If the web was still html-driven more than JS-driven, you wouldn’t need to make your site “agent-ready”. On the same topic, it’s hilarious how much everybody suddenly cares about ergonomics of non-browser software. I have used SO many APIs that are just miserably documented, but now they have magical MCPs!! Which seem like they’re basically well-documented APIs? And suddenly everything needs to hav…
Honestly, the whole MCP thing has completely killed what little faith I had in commercial software development.
Re: The Website Specification
#168I'd love best practices around, say, login forms, e.g.: - use standard input field names password managers recognize - disable autocompletion and autocapitalization on the login field - if it's an email, use the correct HTML5 input type - don't have a form with just a login email and force the user to click to enter the password - follow NIST SP 800-53, e.g. no SMS 2FA and no arbitrary password rotation and compositi…
> use standard input field names password managers recognize - disable autocompletion and autocapitalization on the login field
Alternatively, have different predefined types of input fields, like they already do with accepted inputs.
Re: The Website Specification
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. Does not prevent the design from being responsive. Even with no CSS at all a design is responsive unless you specifically choose to break that
Right but how would you even display a vertical menu back then? `float: left` was rather bad, so you went back to using tables[0]. Good luck making these responsive. [0]: and to using dozens of images sliced to fit your table cells, for that cool hover effect as well as round corners. :-)
Why would documents have menus? Menus are for applications.
And there was nothing wrong with tables for layout, especially back then when the alternatives were very brittle.
Re: The Website Specification
#170Earlier 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…
The problem is smartphones. You literally can't make a website from the 2000's nowadays, because that means you want a 800px fixed width layout or something of sort. If you do that, your website will look absolutely gorgeous since the 800px width + precise pointer + hover requirement allows you to get rid of all unnecessary whitespace, explain the UI with tooltips, and guarantees you always have enough width for one…
The css zengarden works fine on phones?
Granted, then you're talking 2003.