The Website Specification

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.

Foundations

14 The HTML, head, and document basics every page needs.

SEO

13 Search visibility — robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, structured data.

Accessibility

20 WCAG-aligned rules so people of all abilities can use the site.

Security

12 Headers, transport, and policies that keep visitors safe.

Well-Known URIs

9 Standard, agreed-upon paths under /.well-known/.

Agent Readiness

18 Things that make a site legible to AI agents and crawlers.

Performance

19 Core Web Vitals, caching, images, fonts, network behaviour.

Privacy

6 Consent, signals, and respecting visitor choice.

Resilience

5 Graceful failure — error pages, offline, redirects.

Internationalisation

12 Language, locale, direction, and translated content.

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.

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

• 01. Audit: Run through the checklist. Each item is a “does the site do this — yes or no.”
• 02. Learn: Click into any item for what it is, why it matters, and how to implement it.
• 03. Improve: Found a gap, a stale fact, or a missing topic? Open a PR. Sources required.