[Swizec]

If only there were some way for websites to serve information and provide interactivity in a machine readable format. Like some sort of application programming interface. You could even return different formats based on some sort of 4-letter code at the end of a URL like .html, .json, .xml, etc.

And what if there was some standard sort of way for robots to tell your site what they're trying to do with some sort of verb like GET, PUT, POST, DELETE etc. They could even use a standard way to name the resource they're trying to interact with. Like a universal resource finder of some kind. You could even use identifiers to be specific! Like /items/ gives you a list of items and /items/1.json gives you data about a specific item.

That would be so awesome. The future is amazing.

[marcusb]

The only thing that would make that even more perfect would be if there was some way for the site owner to signal to prospective bots which parts of the site are open to the bots to visit. I know this seems really complicated, but I really think it could be expressed in a simple text file.

[tough]

i dont know, robots.txt sounds too complicated for 2025

[thwarted]

I would have worded this as "it sounds to simple for 2025".

[mubou]

Accept: and rel="alternate" were literally made for this