Mark Nottingham on how to define a well-known URI

Category: Engineering post
Status: discussion
Sources: mnot.net, discussion
Summary: Mark Nottingham, co-author of RFC 8615 and the IANA well-known URI registry expert, published guidance on 2026-06-19 for designing .well-known/ URIs. He argues they fit discovery of facts about a site as a whole, such as access policies, and cautions against using them as URL shorteners or legitimacy signals because that locks deployments into rigid one-to-one site-to-service relationships. The post covers discovery mechanisms, content-metadata tradeoffs, transition planning, and registering new well-known locations through the IANA GitHub process.
Why it matters: It is authoritative design guidance for a widely used web-platform mechanism, pairing with the HTTP QUERY method (RFC 10008) standardized this week as part of the same protocol-hygiene theme.