The specification is intended for both people and software agents. Each checklist item explains what the feature is, why it matters and how it can be implemented. A developer can run the list against a site, address missing items and check again. The project points individual topics back to sources such as WHATWG, W3C, IETF requests for comments, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and MDN.
Coverage is divided into ten areas. These include core HTML and document metadata; search discovery through robots files, sitemaps, canonical addresses and structured data; accessibility and color contrast; transport security, headers and browser policies; and standard paths under `/.well-known/`. The list also covers performance topics such as Core Web Vitals, caching, images, fonts and network behavior.
Other sections address machine-readable access for agents and crawlers, consent and user-choice signals, error handling, offline behavior, redirects, language, locale, text direction and translated content. Taken together, the categories treat a website as more than the page visible in a browser. They include the surrounding protocols and operational behavior that influence whether a service can be found, understood, secured and recovered when something goes wrong.
The authors describe the project as implementation-neutral. Its requirements are meant to apply whether a site runs on WordPress, Drupal, TYPO3, Next.js, Astro, Hugo, Django or plain HTML. Framework-specific advice follows the standard rather than replacing it. That distinction could make the checklist useful during technology migrations, when the desired external behavior remains stable even though the underlying stack changes.
The project is available under the MIT license and invites contributions through GitHub; every page includes an edit link and credits its standards sources. It also publishes a read-only, unauthenticated MCP server and an Agent Skill for compatible automation systems. Per-page Markdown can be requested through `llms.txt` or the `Accept: text/markdown` header, giving tools a structured alternative to scraping rendered pages.
The specification does not replace the standards it summarizes, and a yes-or-no audit cannot capture every issue of usability or implementation quality. Its contribution is to provide one navigable entry point across disciplines that are often checked separately, making omissions easier to identify before a site reaches production.\n\nBecause every item links outward to an originating authority, users can investigate requirements that need more nuance than the summary provides. The open contribution model also creates a route for correcting stale guidance as browser behavior and standards evolve.
