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tsazan 3 hours ago

The CC0 license is not a bug. It is a feature. If you fork this and build a standard that helps merchants better, the mission succeeds. I will be the first to applaud. As for "We": It is an invitation, not a pretension. A standard cannot be a solo act. I am bootstrapping the working group. You are welcome to join it, disagreements and all.

robotstxtwasbad 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Thank you for the invitation. One of the things you realize reading and writing a lot of standards -- and I really don't mean that to be condescending towards you, promise -- is that there's a certain orthodoxy to the whole thing regarding keeping an arm's length from commerce.

Consider C#. Yeah, yeah, we all know the provenance of the language, that what ECMA has standardized is basically a Microsoft specification, but once it's an ECMA standard it's Something Else. Competitors can work on it together, and we're all fine with that. Carrying on C# development in the open is harder for Microsoft in some ways, and easier for them in others. This opinion is about ten years old, mind you, and speaks more to the origin of C# (I'm not a practitioner), so I'm sure the Core stuff has changed all of this and made me look silly saying this, but that speaks to my point -- work evolves in public. But they work on it, their competitors work on it, randoms like you and me work on it, and everybody benefits.

Say I work at Apple. I tell my boss I had lunch with a Samsung guy, I might get a side eye. I tell my boss I had lunch with a Samsung guy because we're collaborating on some revision to SSD TRIM or something, it's oh, cool. That's the orthodoxy. Look at, like, WebKit threads before the schism (itself very relevant to this point, in fact). It's extremely important to even _attain_ public standards and collaboration that we all suspend the rules of commerce and competition and conflict and all that. You're arguing the opposite in saying the words "Wix" or "Shopify" should be anywhere near influencing the effort you're proposing. Step back practically, even, and ask yourself: "why should every Web operator deal with some standards crap due to a Shopify product decision? Why is /llms.txt or /products.txt or /yourthing.txt a new land mine for an unsuspecting nginx admin to find?"

There's a collaborating on the common good that should be inherent to the production of shared standards of humanity. Much like science, and their centuries of wrestling with this very point in colorful ways. The Internet is one of humanity's most important inventions, and getting trillion-dollar caps to agree on how to operate it is so incredibly fragile.

If you try to argue with me that because Wix and Shopify both have stupid designs that remove control over a URI from a Web author, I should relax my belief that standardization efforts are fundamentally an activity agnostic of commerce itself, I'd rather gnaw off my left leg than collaborate with a group you lead. We're just going to fight too much. I don't mean this to be disrespectful, for the record, I'm only trying to vividly illustrate how far apart philosophically that seemingly minor opinion places us.

And sure, you're addressing commerce as a subject matter, but one of the ways to lift this from idea to standard is realize the generality behind your effort ("things" available here, not items available for purchase, i.e., philosophically Open Graph's approach, one of the few ways I see your work succeeding).

tsazan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I respect that orthodoxy. It is the bedrock that allows the Internet to function. But we are optimizing for different variables. You optimize for architectural purity on a timeline of decades. You protect the namespace from temporary corporate flaws. I optimize for utility on a timeline of now. I want the flower shop owner to be visible to AI today, even if their platform is rigid. We have different North Stars. That is okay. You guard the temple. I will help the merchants outside. No leg-gnawing required. Thank you for the perspective.