$ grep -r "web standards" ~/blog/

The Web Audio API represents one of the most ambitious and controversial additions to the web platform. Designed to bring professional grade audio processing to browsers, it promised to enable everything from game audio engines to digital audio workstations (DAWs) running entirely in the browser. Nearly a decade after its initial release, the API has achieved widespread browser support and enabled impressive demonstrations. Yet beneath the surface lies a more complicated story: one of design compromises, unmet expectations, and fundamental tensions between different visions of what audio on the web should be.

This is not just another technical critique. The Web Audio API’s troubled history reveals important lessons about web standards development, the challenges of designing APIs by committee, and the sometimes painful gap between what audio professionals think developers need and what developers actually need.

There’s something beautifully ironic happening on the web right now. Hundreds of websites have implemented a new standard called /llms.txt—a carefully crafted markdown file designed to help AI systems understand their content. Developers have built tools to generate these files. Community directories catalog implementations. SEO platforms flag sites that don’t have one.

There’s just one problem: not a single major AI platform actually uses it.

No, really. Not OpenAI. Not Google. Not Anthropic. Not Meta. The very systems that /llms.txt was designed to serve don’t even check if the file exists. Server logs confirm it: when AI crawlers visit your website, they sail right past your lovingly crafted llms.txt file without a second glance.

This isn’t just a story about a failed web standard. It’s a revealing case study in the power dynamics of the AI era, the challenges of grassroots standardization, and the growing tension between publishers and the platforms that increasingly control how their content reaches users. The /llms.txt saga tells us something important about who holds power in the AI/web ecosystem—and it’s not the people creating content.

Every web developer has encountered the frustration of inconsistent metadata discovery across different websites and services. Where do you find a site’s security contact information? How do you discover OAuth endpoints? What about password change URLs for password managers? The web’s decentralized nature, while powerful, has historically led to fragmented approaches for exposing essential service metadata.

The Well-known URI standard, formalized in RFC 8615 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), provides an elegant solution to this fundamental problem. By establishing a standardized location for service metadata at /.well-known/, this specification enables consistent, predictable discovery of critical information across the entire web ecosystem.