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 lik

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).