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The Website Specification

specification.website

21–30 of 236 posts

Re: The Website Specification

#21
post #8

llms.txt is supported by 0 of the relevant ai providers and must be seen as harmful .. as the webmaster implemented something that they might thought has an impact (false sense of impact), but has zero so net gain negative i consider such lists harmful - a good website is one that supports the goal of the website providers and its desired users (some of these users might be bots) a bad website is a website that does…

"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Checklists" (https://rs.io/unreasonable-effectiveness-of-checklists/) comes to mind.

When I was younger I would have though the same. Now that I have more humility and less working memory, I think differently.

Re: The Website Specification

#22
I haven't seen this much bullshit in a long time. Can we just run a webserver, write the html and whatnot and call it a day? It's not like a webdev didn't have anything to do already.

Re: The Website Specification

#23
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?

Re: The Website Specification

#24
post #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 penal…

This is what reader mode is. It exists purely because most websites are unreadable.

Re: The Website Specification

#25
post #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.

> 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.

That's fine. We need a fix for today's problems today.

Re: The Website Specification

#26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 penal…

This is what reader mode is. It exists purely because most websites are unreadable.

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 it for agents?

Re: The Website Specification

#28

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.

It triggers slop flags for me too.

1 - The little color tags : required, optional, recommended.

2 - The insane amount of content no one is ever going to read

3 - the weak premise for an idea carried out to excruciating detail

Re: The Website Specification

#29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what reader mode is. It exists purely because most websites are unreadable.

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…

Agents don't buy stuff they see in an ad
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