CGI

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

Sitemap

A file in XML format that allows webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for web crawling.

Text

The plain text document format.

Humans.txt

A text file that can be created by developers to list the people who have contributed to a website.

OpenAPI

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

Markdown

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

XML

A markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing structured data in a platform-independent way.

RDF

A W3C standard model to describe and exchange graph data on the web.

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.

Prerender

The rel="prerender" attribute on HTML elements.

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.

LLMs.txt

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

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.

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.

IDN

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

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

A vendor- and tool-agnostic observability framework and toolkit for creating and managing telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs.

Onion

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

XMP

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

WCAG

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are an international standard developed by the W3C that defines how to make web content, including text and media, accessible to people with disabilities.

A non-proprietary protocol for encrypting email using public key cryptography.

XRDS

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

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

IndieAuth

A decentralized identity protocol built on top of OAuth 2.0.