3 ms·

I had no idea .well-known was a standard (RFC 5785). Strange choice of name for a site metadata location.

• chriswarbo 10y ago
  It's to prevent a proliferation of things like /favicon.ico, /robots.txt, etc. each of which may actually be dynamically generated (e.g. think of subdomains like someguy.tumblr.com ), and therefore requires separate handling in firewalls, routing, etc. Basically many of the same problems you might encounter with librarys whose API is a bunch of globals; or a shell script which takes in options from hardcoded file paths rather than commandline flags or env vars. The ".well-known" path makes this easier to manage going forward, since you can single it out for special handling once, and implement the contents however you like (statically, dynamically, whatever).
  • mstade 10y ago
    Not to mention that there's also an IANA registry for these URLs, so things can be a little less ad-hoc: https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-uris.xml https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-...