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Comment by reddalo | Hacker News Reader

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reddalo·

I don't understand why new proposed standards are still polluting the root namespace (also see llms.txt).

These things should be put under /.well-known [1], not in the root.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-known_URI

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User friendliness. I’ve seen several less-technical people able to quickly access, create, and understand “llms.txt”.

It’s not ideal but representative of the tension between user experience and technical correctness.

>less-technical people able to quickly access

Why would somebody even want to access that file? It doesn't make any sense to make that more user friendly, it's for LLMs.

I was not aware you shouldn’t do that — what’s the rationale/historical context?

Like most standards: "Because it's a standard". Kind of like setting a .body for a GET request, you can kind of do that, but why not do it the way it's intended to instead? Use POST :)

I have seen post being used instead of get, because of having encrypted parameters by default.

Yeah, and also because of firewalls sometimes stripping body of GET requests (not responses mind you, we're talking requests) to a server, and also because it's really uncommon to put a body on a GET request ;)

Sending a URL encoded form or some JSON in a POST request is also easier for most people to understand than the myriad ways you might format a query string in the URL (which may have a stricter limit on size).

You only have to look at how different services handle arrays in query strings to understand that serialising it is conceptually easier.

Comes up a lot in search or filter APIs. I'm sure there was some effort many moons ago to create a QUERY method for that.

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