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Is been an RFC for almost a decade, RFC5785 [0].

Mattias Geniar has a good write up on it [1].

[1] https://ma.ttias.be/well-known-directory-webservers-aka-rfc-...

Neither seems to explain why these files aren't just placed in root, like robots.txt. What's the point of having a subpath?

The RFC says:

> 2. Why /.well-known? It's short, descriptive, and according to search indices, not widely used.

This gives reasoning for the name of the subpath, but not its existence.

To minimize collisions, and so we're not retreading this argument in another ten years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19063727

Ok, yeah. It occurs to me that websites might want the whole path to be variable text, maybe user defined.

This would also answer the question I've had for so long as to why Wikipedia chose to have /wiki/ before article titles in their URLs. I guess it was so that the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/robots.txt did not collide with their robots.txt file.

Would've been nice if that explanation were included in the RFC.

Interesting. I guess I've been out of the web dev scene for a little over a decade now, so that makes sense.

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