15 ms·

The Website Specification

559 points by k1m 4mo ago

throwaw12 4mo ago
Looks interesting, can you convert it to a skill with bunch of scripts to validate those guidelines and use it to build the websites?
- tulio_ribeiro 4mo ago
  Maybe these are what you mean? https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/blob/main/public/.well-known/agent-skills/specification-website/SKILL.md https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/blob/main/p... https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/blob/main/mcp/README.md https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/blob/main/m...
sinansaka 4mo ago
This is pretty cool, didnt even know of half the options under well-known urls. Thanks!
WA 4mo ago
.well-known/security is listed as a prominent example, but is not in the well-known category.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 4mo ago
  Useful reference https://securitytxt.org/ https://securitytxt.org/ Though some sites drop it at the root /security.txt instead of /.well-known/security.txt Note, invites beg bounties spam.
- kijin 4mo ago
  It's in the "Security" category. I guess whatever categorization scheme they're using doesn't allow assigning multiple categories per item.
zophi 4mo ago
Hmm wondering how common some of these are ... I'd love /.well-known/change-password but it looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/.well-known/change-password https://news.ycombinator.com/.well-known/change-password and google.com/.well-known/change-password don't seem to be implemented?
- king_zee 4mo ago
  security.txt is always under this folder for sites if it exists, it's also used by letsencrypt for certs or renewals fail
- jeroenhd 4mo ago
  It works in Safari and Chrome it looks like: https://web.dev/articles/change-password-url https://web.dev/articles/change-password-url I've never heard of it actually being used, though. Google's URL is on https://accounts.google.com/.well-known/change-password https://accounts.google.com/.well-known/change-password but not on their main domain.
incognitoninja 4mo ago
This seems good especially as beginner still face deep in the weeds of just the pure introductory functional concepts
- deleted 4mo ago
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cbm-vic-20 4mo ago
See also: https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-uris.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-...
franze 4mo ago
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 everything for everyone just because
- glimmung 4mo ago
  "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Checklists" (https://rs.io/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.
  - franze 4mo ago
    but in a checklist you include what actually you need to check, not everything and especially not stuff that is harmful l and/or has negative gain
    - marcosdumay 4mo ago
      Think of those public, generic lists as checklist's checklists. You should look at those items asking "will adding this to my checklist help achieving my goals?", and answer with a heavy bias towards "no". You won't find generic lists that are well suited to your case, and you certainly won't find any flawless one. If you don't know the details about one of those items, you either go with "no" or learn them. But there is a lot of value on getting a list you can look at and discover something that you forgot.
- sparkling 4mo ago
  >llms.txt is supported by 0 of the relevant ai providers True, but it serves a other purpose, especially when the website is offering developer-oriented services. It's a single link you can give your AI agent and ask to "read this, understand it does, implement it". Sure, you could just point it at docs.<service>.com but there might be bot protection, authentication, JS-heavy content etc. So i feel llms.txt still has a purpose.
nimitlabs 4mo ago
Great!
Latty 4mo ago
"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 will be intentionally ignored.)
- kijin 4mo ago
  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.
  - locknitpicker 4mo ago
    > 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.
    - kijin 4mo ago
      True, that's fine. As long as people don't elevate these transient "standards" to the same level as something like basic security and accessibility.
      - locknitpicker 4mo ago
        > True, that's fine. As long as people don't elevate these transient "standards" to the same level as something like basic security and accessibility. I don't think that's it at all, and I'm baffled as the suggestion it is. These things are just formats for ad-hoc interfaces to help share context used by agents. It's in the same vein of designing cli apps with progressive disclosure in mind.
    - 4mo ago
selfhoster1312 4mo ago
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.
- TZubiri 4mo ago
  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
- wenderen 4mo ago
  From the about page (https://specification.website/about/ 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.
  - mschuster91 4mo ago
    > It's hard to tell how much of the site is LLM slop, but some of the copy sure is. Can't speak for the AI readiness stuff, the general webdev stuff is solid. Copy is fluffed up of course but didn't find any glaring errors and omissions.
    - brazukadev 4mo ago
      > the general webdev stuff is solid AI content is not bad. It is just slop, soulless, revolting.
  - chamomeal 4mo ago
    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??
baliex 4mo ago
What a great resource. As someone who’s been making websites for 30 years, it’s amazing to still be picking up some of the basics. Though to be fair many of these didn’t exist back then. I’ll be using this to add some extra tags to my pages. It looks like there are some features noted as “required” that are actually required by the spec (e.g. a title tag), and others that are required by opinion (e.g. https) so there’s an element^ of pragmatic best practice being recommended. I find it curious that setting a colour hint for the browser is recommended. I’m one for letting the browser look as vanilla as possible and letting my pages do the talking. ^Pun not intended, blink and you’ll miss it
- efilife 4mo ago
  What are the things you learned from this website?
mschuster91 4mo ago
I heavily assume this is at least partially AI generated... but I have to admit, this is actually useful (aka, human driven). Nice work.
vladsiu 4mo ago
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pratikdeoghare 4mo ago
Having such a list is great. I am all for such lists. BUT Some people memorize these things. Take them too seriously. You are thought stupid if you don't know them. Somewhere someone then makes a story on Jira to verify that your product does all of these things and you have to convince them that we are fine without them or we don't need all of them etc.
tosti 4mo ago
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.
- deleted 4mo ago
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- 3683826312819 4mo ago
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Kwpolska 4mo ago
Let’s look at the Git history: https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commits/main/ 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?
- jeroenhd 4mo ago
  If you're going to slop something together, why not mark it as such? I appreciate marked slop much more than hidden slop.
  - Kwpolska 4mo ago
    [dead]
ItsABytecode 4mo ago
Some of this is pretty good stuff, but I hope standardizing on a 128 item checklist doesn't discourage people from making websites
knowmygpa 4mo ago
This would be a really great resource website in 2016. But right now, when AI can just spit out everything you have on website faster and in a more personalized way then i dont think that people would wanna use this much. Just my perspective, dont wanna be rude
- woadwarrior01 4mo ago
  Don't want to be rude. If you don't want to read it, at least ask your AI to read it for you.
_ache_ 4mo ago
https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fspecification.website%2F https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fspecification... I don't get the goal of the website. It's averted as a specification, but to spec what ?! Everything is sourced to another "source of truth".
- k1m 4mo ago
  I saw this posted on LinkedIn[1], where the author wrote: > I got tired of pointing at six different sources to back a single recommendation. WHATWG for HTML. WCAG for accessibility. IETF for headers. schema.org for structured data. MDN, web.dev, Google Search Central for everything else. > There was no single, opinionated, platform-agnostic spec for "what does a modern website actually need to do?" > So I wrote one. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdevalk_the-website-specification-share-7466108556518277121-bS5J/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdevalk_the-website-specifica...
- fmajid 4mo ago
  It's a compilation of best practices, and valuable as a one-stop-shop and checklist.
  - nvader 4mo ago
    That's debatable. Every best-practice arose to solve a real problem within a context, and is only "best" if that context applies. If you apply best-practices without a regard for that context, you end up with a dull, cargo-culted checklist of must-haves to beat people over the head with, without deriving any true human value. The compiler of this artifact is making a judgement call[0] of what best practices apply somewhat universally (to every "decent website"). I haven't yet been convinced of their standing or judgement to make that decision. [0]: Charitably, I'm assuming they have, rather than, e.g. delegating the judgement to an opaque model's weights.
    - fmajid 4mo ago
      Some requirements have force of law, e.g. complying with GPC in California or Colorado. So do accessibility features in many jurisdictions. Some are just basic decency, like providing alt txt for images. The approach of marking items as required/recommended/optional addresses your concern. Too bad this specific checklist is LLM-generated.
deleted 4mo ago
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fmajid 4mo ago
I'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 composition rules Or how many sites that have a form with only one input don't automatically focus on it.
- notpushkin 4mo ago
  Evil Martians have a nice write-up on the login forms: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/html-best-practices-for-login-and-signup-forms https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/html-best-practices-for-...
- quirino 4mo ago
  I've had good fun reading about best practices for forms in Adam Silver's blog. https://adamsilver.io/blog/form-design-from-zero-to-hero-all-in-one-blog-post/ https://adamsilver.io/blog/form-design-from-zero-to-hero-all... He has posted many new things since. Probably one of the best UX resources on the web.
- xg15 4mo ago
  > don't have a form with just a login email and force the user to click to enter the password I was noticing that this kind of login forms seems to be proliferating, especially on "big tech" sites. (And personally, I also find it annoying) Always assumed there was some reason why sites are switching to this pattern, e.g. better bot protection. Does anyone know more about this?
  - jurf 4mo ago
    I always assumed it was because of SSO redirects
  - mpetrovich 4mo ago
    I suspect they ask for email first in order to determine whether to log you in via SSO vs. require a password.
todotask2 4mo ago
Some good parts, some bad practices, and a few missing pieces. I spent a lot of time auditing websites and brought all issues down to zero. Many web and SEO agencies have let technical debt build up over the years. I raised some issues to them, but didn’t hear back. After auditing a million websites, can we fix them? We could rebuild the web.
unchar1 4mo ago
Opening the site on my macbook shot the CPU usage to >50%. Seems a bit ironic considering that it's supposed to be a specification on how a website should be.
- w4yai 4mo ago
  Huh ? I don't observe the same thing here. You may want to investigate what's happening on your end!
ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago
[flagged]
Nizoss 4mo ago
Good resource and nicely organized. I took the opportunity to apply a couple new things.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
tanepiper 4mo ago
I actually thought about this a couple of weeks back that for agents - going backwards actually makes sites more capable - WAP would even be more appropriate. The ultimate irony though is that making websites MORE accessible makes them more agent friendly - the last decade of SPAs is what makes things harder.
npc73x 4mo ago
Apart from this, we need standards in what features the website should have for it's domain. for example the hospital website should have a Doctors timings, portal to register and track the ticket, Address with google map link for it's branches, building's schematic for basic navigation, and track the registrations. the Glassy UI comes next before the basic features
bag_boy 4mo ago
Why include the LLMs.txt?
outageroom 4mo ago
[flagged]
sammy2255 4mo ago
Ironic how this "Website spec" website doesn't have caching
Dwedit 4mo ago
I've seen Google Webmaster Tools misidentify a page as a "Soft 404" page before.
kaiokendev 4mo ago
I think the presentation may fail to land because, on the surface, it is nearly wholly AI-generated, but also after reading through many of the entries, everything besides the Agent section seems to clearly communicate solid web hygiene and I wouldn't mind sending this to a burgeoning web developer. It is ironic though that the site itself fails to employ even its own "required" practices, but that's more of an aside.
- TZubiri 4mo ago
  > Compression (gzip, brotli, zstd): required > cache-control: required It's slop all the way man
- deleted 4mo ago
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BubbleRings 4mo ago
Cool. I just dropped the following prompt on the Claude iPhone app and got a nice report out of it: Look at the part of the website at my first link, that describes how to do an audit using their guidelines, then after that, run such an audit on my website at the second link. https://specification.website/ https://specification.website/ Www.my-personal-squarespace-site-not-a-real-url.com
ramon156 4mo ago
My favorite specs are hallucinated ones. Good job, I suppose? Can't wait for an ISO alternative that is agent-driven, or slot machines that are run by LLMs
andai 4mo ago
Will this make my website good though?
tzs 4mo ago
Nearly 80% of the commentators who have mentioned slop appear to be people who have the same relationship with the the word "slop" that Vizzini had with "inconceivable" [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTRKCXC0JFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTRKCXC0JFg
baisampayans 4mo ago
[flagged]
cush 4mo ago
The creative ways most sites break Back/Forward never fails to amaze me
rsolva 4mo ago
Thanks for making this! I planed to make something like this as a skill for my self, but pasting this into any agent chat works like a charm. I just had my local model (Qwen3.6 27B / pi) make a list of all the required standards an older hugo site of mine was missing, make a todo list and then run through the whole thing one by one, giving me chance to review each change. It even made the missing favicon by cropping out the symbol from the logo, and it looks good!
- ramses0 4mo ago
  How much have you mucked with `pi`? I love the "zero overhead" aspect of the short agent/system prompt, but I can just imagine the waiting and potential dead-end's it'd get itself into if I just let it rip on a random task.
  - rsolva 4mo ago
    I have used it almost daily for the last few months, with only 3 simple extensions. On this project I spent a few minutes adding context to an AGENTS.md and having it write a todo list based on the spec, then I start a new chat for each task on the list. Most changes are just a few lines of code so it is very quick to review. But this a very small website project though.
MagicMoonlight 4mo ago
>Standards, not opinions This entire site is just AI slop, defeating the point of the site. If an AI already knows it, then it doesn’t need to read the site.
austin-cheney 4mo ago
If only there was a schema definition that automatically provides corrective guidance to editors…
replwoacause 4mo ago
I don't understand why this submission has so many points. It's not good.
- KajMagnus 4mo ago
  The whole website was apparently AI generated 3 days ago [0], leaves me wondering if this is partly a HN bots upvotes manipulation experiment. Or people here really think an AI gend docs website is top news nowadays? Has the HN demographics changed When the website is AI generated anyway, why not ask Claude or Gemini directly instead of going to the specs website? (Maybe it's useful to the author himself, but personally I don't have any reasons to trust the website more than asking an AI myself + asking for references) [0] https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commit/d8ec520c307bafc022410885b9e4149e7887ab29 https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commit/d8ec...
openports 4mo ago
Feels like AI slop
cawksuwcka 4mo ago
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Talpur1 4mo ago
[dead]
bmn__ 4mo ago
https://specification.website/checklist https://specification.website/checklist → 15 years ago ;) http://www.tickmyboxes.com http://www.tickmyboxes.com
mockbuild 4mo ago
Web 2.0 IoT
PullPage 4mo ago
Structured data (JSON-LD) will be obsolet it seems in the future, thank's to AI. Google just killed FAQPage for example. End of support: From 7 May 2026, rich search results for FAQs will no longer appear in Google Search. The report on rich search results for FAQs will be removed in June 2026.

559 points by k1m 4mo ago

Looks interesting, can you convert it to a skill with bunch of scripts to validate those guidelines and use it to build the websites?

tulio_ribeiro 4mo ago
Maybe these are what you mean? https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/blob/main/public/.well-known/agent-skills/specification-website/SKILL.md https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/blob/main/p... https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/blob/main/mcp/README.md https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/blob/main/m...

sinansaka 4mo ago

This is pretty cool, didnt even know of half the options under well-known urls. Thanks!

WA 4mo ago

.well-known/security is listed as a prominent example, but is not in the well-known category.

8cvor6j844qw_d6 4mo ago
Useful reference https://securitytxt.org/ https://securitytxt.org/ Though some sites drop it at the root /security.txt instead of /.well-known/security.txt Note, invites beg bounties spam.
kijin 4mo ago
It's in the "Security" category. I guess whatever categorization scheme they're using doesn't allow assigning multiple categories per item.

zophi 4mo ago

Hmm wondering how common some of these are ... I'd love /.well-known/change-password but it looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/.well-known/change-password https://news.ycombinator.com/.well-known/change-password and google.com/.well-known/change-password don't seem to be implemented?

king_zee 4mo ago
security.txt is always under this folder for sites if it exists, it's also used by letsencrypt for certs or renewals fail
jeroenhd 4mo ago
It works in Safari and Chrome it looks like: https://web.dev/articles/change-password-url https://web.dev/articles/change-password-url I've never heard of it actually being used, though. Google's URL is on https://accounts.google.com/.well-known/change-password https://accounts.google.com/.well-known/change-password but not on their main domain.

incognitoninja 4mo ago

This seems good especially as beginner still face deep in the weeds of just the pure introductory functional concepts

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

cbm-vic-20 4mo ago

See also: https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-uris.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-...

franze 4mo ago

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 everything for everyone just because

glimmung 4mo ago
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Checklists" (https://rs.io/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.
- franze 4mo ago
  but in a checklist you include what actually you need to check, not everything and especially not stuff that is harmful l and/or has negative gain
  - marcosdumay 4mo ago
    Think of those public, generic lists as checklist's checklists. You should look at those items asking "will adding this to my checklist help achieving my goals?", and answer with a heavy bias towards "no". You won't find generic lists that are well suited to your case, and you certainly won't find any flawless one. If you don't know the details about one of those items, you either go with "no" or learn them. But there is a lot of value on getting a list you can look at and discover something that you forgot.
sparkling 4mo ago
>llms.txt is supported by 0 of the relevant ai providers True, but it serves a other purpose, especially when the website is offering developer-oriented services. It's a single link you can give your AI agent and ask to "read this, understand it does, implement it". Sure, you could just point it at docs.<service>.com but there might be bot protection, authentication, JS-heavy content etc. So i feel llms.txt still has a purpose.

nimitlabs 4mo ago

Great!

Latty 4mo ago

"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 will be intentionally ignored.)

kijin 4mo ago
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.
- locknitpicker 4mo ago
  > 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.
  - kijin 4mo ago
    True, that's fine. As long as people don't elevate these transient "standards" to the same level as something like basic security and accessibility.
    - locknitpicker 4mo ago
      > True, that's fine. As long as people don't elevate these transient "standards" to the same level as something like basic security and accessibility. I don't think that's it at all, and I'm baffled as the suggestion it is. These things are just formats for ad-hoc interfaces to help share context used by agents. It's in the same vein of designing cli apps with progressive disclosure in mind.
  - 4mo ago

selfhoster1312 4mo ago

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.

TZubiri 4mo ago
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
wenderen 4mo ago
From the about page (https://specification.website/about/ 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.
- mschuster91 4mo ago
  > It's hard to tell how much of the site is LLM slop, but some of the copy sure is. Can't speak for the AI readiness stuff, the general webdev stuff is solid. Copy is fluffed up of course but didn't find any glaring errors and omissions.
  - brazukadev 4mo ago
    > the general webdev stuff is solid AI content is not bad. It is just slop, soulless, revolting.
- chamomeal 4mo ago
  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??

baliex 4mo ago

What a great resource. As someone who’s been making websites for 30 years, it’s amazing to still be picking up some of the basics. Though to be fair many of these didn’t exist back then. I’ll be using this to add some extra tags to my pages. It looks like there are some features noted as “required” that are actually required by the spec (e.g. a title tag), and others that are required by opinion (e.g. https) so there’s an element^ of pragmatic best practice being recommended. I find it curious that setting a colour hint for the browser is recommended. I’m one for letting the browser look as vanilla as possible and letting my pages do the talking. ^Pun not intended, blink and you’ll miss it

efilife 4mo ago
What are the things you learned from this website?

mschuster91 4mo ago

I heavily assume this is at least partially AI generated... but I have to admit, this is actually useful (aka, human driven). Nice work.

vladsiu 4mo ago

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pratikdeoghare 4mo ago

Having such a list is great. I am all for such lists. BUT Some people memorize these things. Take them too seriously. You are thought stupid if you don't know them. Somewhere someone then makes a story on Jira to verify that your product does all of these things and you have to convince them that we are fine without them or we don't need all of them etc.

tosti 4mo ago

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.

deleted 4mo ago
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3683826312819 4mo ago
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Kwpolska 4mo ago

Let’s look at the Git history: https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commits/main/ 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?

jeroenhd 4mo ago
If you're going to slop something together, why not mark it as such? I appreciate marked slop much more than hidden slop.
- Kwpolska 4mo ago
  [dead]

ItsABytecode 4mo ago

Some of this is pretty good stuff, but I hope standardizing on a 128 item checklist doesn't discourage people from making websites

knowmygpa 4mo ago

This would be a really great resource website in 2016. But right now, when AI can just spit out everything you have on website faster and in a more personalized way then i dont think that people would wanna use this much. Just my perspective, dont wanna be rude

woadwarrior01 4mo ago
Don't want to be rude. If you don't want to read it, at least ask your AI to read it for you.

_ache_ 4mo ago

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fspecification.website%2F https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fspecification... I don't get the goal of the website. It's averted as a specification, but to spec what ?! Everything is sourced to another "source of truth".

k1m 4mo ago
I saw this posted on LinkedIn[1], where the author wrote: > I got tired of pointing at six different sources to back a single recommendation. WHATWG for HTML. WCAG for accessibility. IETF for headers. schema.org for structured data. MDN, web.dev, Google Search Central for everything else. > There was no single, opinionated, platform-agnostic spec for "what does a modern website actually need to do?" > So I wrote one. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdevalk_the-website-specification-share-7466108556518277121-bS5J/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdevalk_the-website-specifica...
fmajid 4mo ago
It's a compilation of best practices, and valuable as a one-stop-shop and checklist.
- nvader 4mo ago
  That's debatable. Every best-practice arose to solve a real problem within a context, and is only "best" if that context applies. If you apply best-practices without a regard for that context, you end up with a dull, cargo-culted checklist of must-haves to beat people over the head with, without deriving any true human value. The compiler of this artifact is making a judgement call[0] of what best practices apply somewhat universally (to every "decent website"). I haven't yet been convinced of their standing or judgement to make that decision. [0]: Charitably, I'm assuming they have, rather than, e.g. delegating the judgement to an opaque model's weights.
  - fmajid 4mo ago
    Some requirements have force of law, e.g. complying with GPC in California or Colorado. So do accessibility features in many jurisdictions. Some are just basic decency, like providing alt txt for images. The approach of marking items as required/recommended/optional addresses your concern. Too bad this specific checklist is LLM-generated.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

fmajid 4mo ago

I'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 composition rules Or how many sites that have a form with only one input don't automatically focus on it.

notpushkin 4mo ago
Evil Martians have a nice write-up on the login forms: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/html-best-practices-for-login-and-signup-forms https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/html-best-practices-for-...
quirino 4mo ago
I've had good fun reading about best practices for forms in Adam Silver's blog. https://adamsilver.io/blog/form-design-from-zero-to-hero-all-in-one-blog-post/ https://adamsilver.io/blog/form-design-from-zero-to-hero-all... He has posted many new things since. Probably one of the best UX resources on the web.
xg15 4mo ago
> don't have a form with just a login email and force the user to click to enter the password I was noticing that this kind of login forms seems to be proliferating, especially on "big tech" sites. (And personally, I also find it annoying) Always assumed there was some reason why sites are switching to this pattern, e.g. better bot protection. Does anyone know more about this?
- jurf 4mo ago
  I always assumed it was because of SSO redirects
- mpetrovich 4mo ago
  I suspect they ask for email first in order to determine whether to log you in via SSO vs. require a password.

todotask2 4mo ago

Some good parts, some bad practices, and a few missing pieces. I spent a lot of time auditing websites and brought all issues down to zero. Many web and SEO agencies have let technical debt build up over the years. I raised some issues to them, but didn’t hear back. After auditing a million websites, can we fix them? We could rebuild the web.

unchar1 4mo ago

Opening the site on my macbook shot the CPU usage to >50%. Seems a bit ironic considering that it's supposed to be a specification on how a website should be.

w4yai 4mo ago
Huh ? I don't observe the same thing here. You may want to investigate what's happening on your end!

ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago

[flagged]

Nizoss 4mo ago

Good resource and nicely organized. I took the opportunity to apply a couple new things.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

tanepiper 4mo ago

I actually thought about this a couple of weeks back that for agents - going backwards actually makes sites more capable - WAP would even be more appropriate. The ultimate irony though is that making websites MORE accessible makes them more agent friendly - the last decade of SPAs is what makes things harder.

npc73x 4mo ago

Apart from this, we need standards in what features the website should have for it's domain. for example the hospital website should have a Doctors timings, portal to register and track the ticket, Address with google map link for it's branches, building's schematic for basic navigation, and track the registrations. the Glassy UI comes next before the basic features

bag_boy 4mo ago

Why include the LLMs.txt?

outageroom 4mo ago

[flagged]

sammy2255 4mo ago

Ironic how this "Website spec" website doesn't have caching

Dwedit 4mo ago

I've seen Google Webmaster Tools misidentify a page as a "Soft 404" page before.

kaiokendev 4mo ago

I think the presentation may fail to land because, on the surface, it is nearly wholly AI-generated, but also after reading through many of the entries, everything besides the Agent section seems to clearly communicate solid web hygiene and I wouldn't mind sending this to a burgeoning web developer. It is ironic though that the site itself fails to employ even its own "required" practices, but that's more of an aside.

TZubiri 4mo ago
> Compression (gzip, brotli, zstd): required > cache-control: required It's slop all the way man
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

BubbleRings 4mo ago

Cool. I just dropped the following prompt on the Claude iPhone app and got a nice report out of it: Look at the part of the website at my first link, that describes how to do an audit using their guidelines, then after that, run such an audit on my website at the second link. https://specification.website/ https://specification.website/ Www.my-personal-squarespace-site-not-a-real-url.com

ramon156 4mo ago

My favorite specs are hallucinated ones. Good job, I suppose? Can't wait for an ISO alternative that is agent-driven, or slot machines that are run by LLMs

andai 4mo ago

Will this make my website good though?

tzs 4mo ago

Nearly 80% of the commentators who have mentioned slop appear to be people who have the same relationship with the the word "slop" that Vizzini had with "inconceivable" [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTRKCXC0JFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTRKCXC0JFg

baisampayans 4mo ago

[flagged]

cush 4mo ago

The creative ways most sites break Back/Forward never fails to amaze me

rsolva 4mo ago

Thanks for making this! I planed to make something like this as a skill for my self, but pasting this into any agent chat works like a charm. I just had my local model (Qwen3.6 27B / pi) make a list of all the required standards an older hugo site of mine was missing, make a todo list and then run through the whole thing one by one, giving me chance to review each change. It even made the missing favicon by cropping out the symbol from the logo, and it looks good!

ramses0 4mo ago
How much have you mucked with `pi`? I love the "zero overhead" aspect of the short agent/system prompt, but I can just imagine the waiting and potential dead-end's it'd get itself into if I just let it rip on a random task.
- rsolva 4mo ago
  I have used it almost daily for the last few months, with only 3 simple extensions. On this project I spent a few minutes adding context to an AGENTS.md and having it write a todo list based on the spec, then I start a new chat for each task on the list. Most changes are just a few lines of code so it is very quick to review. But this a very small website project though.

MagicMoonlight 4mo ago

>Standards, not opinions This entire site is just AI slop, defeating the point of the site. If an AI already knows it, then it doesn’t need to read the site.

austin-cheney 4mo ago

If only there was a schema definition that automatically provides corrective guidance to editors…

replwoacause 4mo ago

I don't understand why this submission has so many points. It's not good.

KajMagnus 4mo ago
The whole website was apparently AI generated 3 days ago [0], leaves me wondering if this is partly a HN bots upvotes manipulation experiment. Or people here really think an AI gend docs website is top news nowadays? Has the HN demographics changed When the website is AI generated anyway, why not ask Claude or Gemini directly instead of going to the specs website? (Maybe it's useful to the author himself, but personally I don't have any reasons to trust the website more than asking an AI myself + asking for references) [0] https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commit/d8ec520c307bafc022410885b9e4149e7887ab29 https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commit/d8ec...

openports 4mo ago

Feels like AI slop

cawksuwcka 4mo ago

[dead]

Talpur1 4mo ago

[dead]

bmn__ 4mo ago

https://specification.website/checklist https://specification.website/checklist → 15 years ago ;) http://www.tickmyboxes.com http://www.tickmyboxes.com

mockbuild 4mo ago

Web 2.0 IoT

PullPage 4mo ago

Structured data (JSON-LD) will be obsolet it seems in the future, thank's to AI. Google just killed FAQPage for example. End of support: From 7 May 2026, rich search results for FAQs will no longer appear in Google Search. The report on rich search results for FAQs will be removed in June 2026.