Website Spec

Changelog

What changed in the spec — new topics, status changes, and honest removals, newest first. Subscribe via RSS.

June 2026

  1. Added

    Added a page on accessible authentication

    New Accessibility topic on accessible authentication — WCAG 2.2 added success criteria 3.3.8 and 3.3.9, which forbid making people pass a cognitive function test (recalling a password, transcribing a code, solving a puzzle) to log in unless an accessible alternative exists. The page covers supporting password managers, allowing paste, autocomplete="one-time-code", and passkeys; status: recommended.

  2. Changed

    MDN's MCP server cited on the MCP page

    The MCP and tool discovery page now points to MDN’s 2026 MCP server as a real-world example of a reference site exposing its documentation and Baseline browser-compatibility data over the protocol — reinforcing that a structured, queryable corpus is the case where shipping an MCP server earns its keep.

  3. Added

    Added a page on the Reporting API (Reporting-Endpoints)

    New Security topic on the Reporting API — the Reporting-Endpoints response header that names collectors for the browser’s structured reports: CSP and COOP violations, permissions-policy breaches, deprecations, interventions, and crashes. It supersedes the legacy Report-To header and report-uri directive. The site now ships the header and a collector, closing a ship-it-before-you-spec-it gap; status: recommended.

  4. Added

    Added a page on cross-origin isolation (COOP / COEP / CORP)

    New Security topic on cross-origin isolation — the Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy, Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy, and Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy response headers that sever risky cross-window links (tabnabbing, XS-Leaks) and keep your resources out of an attacker’s process (Spectre). The site already ships COOP and CORP on every response, so this closes a ship-it-before-you-spec-it gap; status: recommended.

  5. Added

    Added a page on Compression Dictionary Transport

    New Performance topic on Compression Dictionary Transport (RFC 9842) — reusing a previously served response, or a dedicated dictionary, as a Brotli/Zstandard dictionary so updated assets compress to a fraction of their size. Pure progressive enhancement over ordinary compression; status: optional.

  6. Changed

    FAQ rich results retired by Google

    Updated Structured data to reflect that Google retired the FAQ rich result in 2026. FAQPage is still valid schema.org vocabulary, but it no longer produces a search feature and no answer engine has confirmed it favours the markup over rendered HTML — so add it only for genuine, visible Q-and-A content, never for SERP or “GEO” gain.

  7. Added

    Added a page on conditional requests

    New Performance topic on conditional requests — how ETag, Last-Modified and 304 Not Modified responses let browsers and agents revalidate cached responses cheaply instead of re-downloading unchanged bodies. Status: recommended.

  8. Added

    Six new topics across six categories

May 2026

  1. Added

    The Website Specification, v0.1

    First public version: a platform-agnostic specification of what a good website does, spanning Foundations, SEO, Accessibility, Security, Well-Known URIs, Agent Readiness, Performance, Privacy, Resilience and Internationalisation. Every topic is tagged required, recommended, optional or avoid, and cited from primary sources. Available as HTML, Markdown, a checklist, llms.txt, RSS, and an MCP server.

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