{"slug": "the-website-specification", "title": "The Website Specification", "summary": "A new website specification, \"What a good website does,\" has been published as a platform-agnostic technical standard covering ten categories including SEO, accessibility, security, and agent readiness. The specification maps each requirement to widely-accepted standards from organizations like WHATWG, W3C, and IETF, and is available as an open MCP server for AI agents to query. The project aims to provide a definitive, community-maintained checklist for building modern websites that serve both humans and automated agents.", "body_md": "# What a good website does.\n\nA platform-agnostic specification of the technical features every\ndecent website should have — from `<title>`\n\nto `/.well-known/security.txt`\n\n,\nfrom WCAG contrast to `llms.txt`\n\n.\nWritten for humans and agents.\n\n## Categories\n\nTen areas, mapped to widely-accepted standards.\n\n[All topics →](/spec/)\n\n-\n### Foundations\n\n14The HTML, head, and document basics every page needs.\n\n-\n### SEO\n\n13Search visibility — robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, structured data.\n\n-\n### Accessibility\n\n20WCAG-aligned rules so people of all abilities can use the site.\n\n-\n### Security\n\n12Headers, transport, and policies that keep visitors safe.\n\n-\n### Well-Known URIs\n\n9Standard, agreed-upon paths under /.well-known/.\n\n-\n### Agent Readiness\n\n18Things that make a site legible to AI agents and crawlers.\n\n-\n### Performance\n\n19Core Web Vitals, caching, images, fonts, network behaviour.\n\n-\n### Privacy\n\n6Consent, signals, and respecting visitor choice.\n\n-\n### Resilience\n\n5Graceful failure — error pages, offline, redirects.\n\n-\n### Internationalisation\n\n12Language, locale, direction, and translated content.\n\n### Standards, not opinions\n\nEach topic links back to the source standard — WHATWG, W3C, IETF RFCs, WCAG, MDN, and the organisations defining the modern web.\n\n### Platform agnostic\n\nWhether you ship WordPress, Drupal, TYPO3, Next.js, Astro, Hugo, a Django app, or plain HTML, the spec is the spec. Implementation hints follow it, not the other way round.\n\n### Built in the open\n\nEvery page has an [Edit on GitHub](https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website) link. PRs welcome. Sources credited on every page.\n\n## Let your agent query the spec.\n\nThe whole spec is available as an open [MCP](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/) server — read-only, no auth — plus a published [Agent Skill](/.well-known/agent-skills/specification-website/SKILL.md) that teaches any compatible agent when and how to use it. Per-page Markdown is available via `/llms.txt`\n\nand `Accept: text/markdown`\n\non any spec URL.\n\n```\n{\n  \"mcpServers\": {\n    \"specification-website\": {\n      \"transport\": \"http\",\n      \"url\": \"https://mcp.specification.website/mcp\"\n    }\n  }\n}\n```\n\n## How to use this site\n\n- 01\n### Audit\n\nRun through the\n\n[checklist](/checklist/). Each item is a “does the site do this — yes or no.” - 02\n### Learn\n\nClick into any item for what it is, why it matters, and how to implement it.\n\n- 03\n### Improve\n\nFound a gap, a stale fact, or a missing topic? Open a PR. Sources required.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-website-specification", "canonical_source": "https://specification.website/", "published_at": "2026-05-31 07:09:50+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-31 07:41:25.158885+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents"], "entities": ["WHATWG", "W3C", "IETF", "WCAG", "MDN"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-website-specification", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-website-specification.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-website-specification.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-website-specification.jsonld"}}