You can't just put things there any time you want - the RFC requires that they go through a registration process.
Having said that, this won't work for llms.txt, since in the next version of the proposal they'll be allowed at any level of the path, not only the root.
> You can't just put things there any time you want - the RFC requires that they go through a registration process.
Actually, I can for two reasons. First is of course the RFC mentions that items can be registered after the fact, if it's found that a particular well-known suffix is being widely used. But the second is a bit more chaotic - website owners are under no obligation to consult a registry, much like port registrations; in many cases they won't even know it exists and may think of it as a place that should reflect their mental model.
It can make things awkward and difficult though, that is true, but that comes with the free text nature of the well-known space. That's made evident in the Github issue linked, a large group of very smart people didn't know that there was a registry for it.
There was no "large group of very smart people" behind llms.txt. It was just me. And I'm very familiar with the registry, and it doesn't work for this particular case IMO (although other folks are welcome to register it if they feel otherwise, of course).
"""
A well-known URI is a URI [RFC3986] whose path component begins with the characters "/.well-known/", and whose scheme is "HTTP", "HTTPS", or another scheme that has explicitly been specified to use well- known URIs.
Applications that wish to mint new well-known URIs MUST register them, following the procedures in Section 5.1.
"""
Keyword being "mint" there. You can still put whatever you want in there, but in order to "register" it, you need to"mint" it by registering it. But you're in no way obligated to register random stuff you put in /.well-known, that'd be bananas to put in a specification like that.
Applications, not the websites, web services, or such. I read that as: "If you are making an application and you want it to introduce a new convention, then sign up here." (otherwise do whatever you want)
Having said that, this won't work for llms.txt, since in the next version of the proposal they'll be allowed at any level of the path, not only the root.