Humans.txt

A plain text file that allows website creators to identify and credit the people involved in developing a website.

Sitemap

A specialized XML file that lists a website's URLs and helps search engines discover pages available for crawling and indexing.

Trace Context

Defines standard HTTP headers and a value format for propagating context information that enables distributed tracing.

Text

The plain text document format.

Markdown

A lightweight markup language used to add formatting to plain text documents using simple, human-readable syntax.

XRDS

An XML-based file format that provides a list of service endpoints (e.g., OpenID) available on a website.

RelMeAuth

A proposed open standard for using rel-me links to profiles on OAuth supporting services to authenticate via either those profiles or your own site.

WebAssembly

A portable binary instruction format that runs in modern web browsers with near-native performance, enabling frontend coding in languages that were not traditionally used for web interfaces, such as C/C++, C#, and Rust.

Prerender

A deprecated browser hint that instructed web browsers to preload and render a web page in the background before navigation occurred.

JSON Web Token

An open standard (RFC 7519) that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object.

CGI

An interface specification that enables web servers to execute an external program to process HTTP requests.

OpenAPI

A specification language for defining HTTP APIs, typically written in YAML or JSON.

LLMs.txt

A proposed standard that provides structured content and instructions to guide large language models in understanding and summarizing a website's content.

Rack

A minimal, modular interface and invocation convention that operates between Ruby web servers and web applications to standardize how HTTP requests and responses are exchanged.

OpenTelemetry

An open-source, vendor-neutral observability framework and toolkit for collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs.

Webmention

A simple protocol to notify any URL when a website links to it, and for web pages to request notifications when somebody links to them.

XMP

An ISO standard for creating, processing, and exchanging metadata for digital documents.

ActivityPub

A decentralized social networking protocol used by various Fediverse services such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, and PeerTube.

ESI

A simple markup language used to define web page components for dynamic assembly and delivery of web applications at the edge of the Internet.

Onion

Sites are websites on the dark web that use the .onion top-level domain and are only accessible through online routing through Tor.

AdChoices

A self-regulatory standard for online interest-based advertising that gives consumers enhanced control over the collection and use of their data to deliver relevant ads.

IDN

Internationalized Domain Names allow people around the world to use domain names in local languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, or Cyrillic.

A peer-to-peer protocol for storing and accessing files and websites in a decentralized file system.