Registration request: pagedigest.json

[maxwellsantoro]

URI suffix

pagedigest.json

Change controller

PageDigest project / Maxwell Santoro

Specification document(s)

• PageDigest v1 specification:
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maxwellsantoro/pagedigest/main/SPEC.md
• Project site:
  https://pagedigest.org/

Status requested

Provisional.

The PageDigest wire format is currently a v1 release candidate. The project
would like expert review before v1.0 and before claiming permanent status.

Purpose

/.well-known/pagedigest.json identifies a site-level change-detection
manifest for automated consumers such as crawlers, indexers, mirrors, and
agents. The manifest lets a stateful consumer compare a publisher's monotonic
site_rev and per-URL rev values before re-fetching pages that have not
changed.

Media type

application/json

Security and privacy considerations

• Manifest integrity relies on HTTPS transport and the publisher's origin
  controls.
• A manifest can reveal a covered URL set. The specification supports partial
  coverage and cautions publishers against overclaiming complete coverage.
• Consumers are required to validate the manifest and apply normal resource
  limits before trusting it as an optimization signal.
• Consumers fall back to their normal crawl behavior when the manifest is
  missing, invalid, unavailable, or internally inconsistent.
• Optional digest values are SHA-256 hashes over identity-encoded response
  bytes and can be sampled by consumers to audit publisher correctness.

Deployment and stability notes

• pagedigest.org publishes a live manifest at:
  https://pagedigest.org/.well-known/pagedigest.json
• dotrepo.org is a measured dogfood producer:
  https://github.com/maxwellsantoro/pagedigest/blob/main/docs/case-studies/dotrepo.md
• The repository includes a reference generator, reference consumer,
  conformance vectors, and release checklist:
  https://github.com/maxwellsantoro/pagedigest

Additional information: I understand that single-owner repositories are weak
references for permanent registration. This request is intended as an early
provisional registration / expert review request while the project gathers
broader deployment feedback.