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The Website Specification

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245 pts · 95 comments on Hacker News

What a good website does.

A platform-agnostic specification of the technical features every decent website should have — from <title> to /.well-known/security.txt, from WCAG contrast to llms.txt. Written for humans and agents.

Browse all 128 topics → Get the checklist ★ on GitHub

Categories

Ten areas, mapped to widely-accepted standards.

All topics →

Standards, not opinions

Each topic links back to the source standard — WHATWG, W3C, IETF RFCs, WCAG, MDN, and the organisations defining the modern web.

Platform agnostic

Whether 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.

Built in the open

Every page has an Edit on GitHub link. PRs welcome. Sources credited on every page.

Let your agent query the spec.

The whole spec is available as an open MCP server — read-only, no auth — plus a published Agent Skill that teaches any compatible agent when and how to use it. Per-page Markdown is available via /llms.txt and Accept: text/markdown on any spec URL.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "specification-website": {
      "transport": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.specification.website/mcp"
    }
  }
}

How to use this site

  1. 01

    Audit

    Run through the checklist. Each item is a “does the site do this — yes or no.”

  2. 02

    Learn

    Click into any item for what it is, why it matters, and how to implement it.

  3. 03

    Improve

    Found a gap, a stale fact, or a missing topic? Open a PR. Sources required.

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