Appendix A. Frequently Asked Questions

Appendix A. Frequently Asked Questions

Aren't well-known locations bad for the Web?

They are, but for various reasons -- both technical and social -- they are sometimes necessary. This memo defines a "sandbox" for them, to reduce the risks of collision and to minimise the impact upon preexisting URIs on sites.

Why /.well-known/?

It's short, descriptive, and according to search indices, not widely used.

What impact does this have on existing mechanisms, such as P3P and robots.txt?

None, until they choose to use this mechanism.

Why aren't per-directory well-known locations defined?

Allowing every URI path segment to have a well-known location (e.g., /images/.well-known/) would increase the risks of colliding with a preexisting URI on a site, and generally these solutions are found not to scale well because they're too "chatty".