specification.website: A Platform-Agnostic Checklist for What a Decent Website Should Do

A new open specification called specification.website attempts to codify what every competent website should implement, organized into ten categories: foundations, SEO, accessibility, security, well-known URIs, agent readiness, performance, privacy, resilience, and internationalization. Each item points back to an authoritative source — WHATWG, W3C, IETF RFCs, WCAG, or MDN — rather than offering its own opinion, with the stated goal of being framework-agnostic across WordPress, Next.js, Django, static HTML, or anything else.

Notably, the spec treats AI agents as first-class consumers alongside humans. It exposes itself through a read-only MCP server, ships an Agent Skill so compatible agents know when to consult it, and serves per-page Markdown via /llms.txt and content negotiation on any spec URL. A full 18-item ‘Agent Readiness’ category sits next to the traditional SEO and accessibility sections.

The project is built in the open on GitHub with edit links on every page and PRs required to cite sources. The pitch to practitioners is straightforward: use it as a yes/no audit checklist, drill into any item for the why and how, and contribute back when gaps appear. It is less a novel standard than a consolidated index of existing ones, aimed at making web hygiene legible to both engineers and the agents increasingly crawling their sites.