So You Want to Define a Well-Known URI

Mark Nottingham, an author of the Well-Known URI specification, explains when well-known URIs are appropriate for protocol design and when they're not. Well-known locations work best when a client needs to discover site-wide information efficiently (like robots.txt for crawlers), but are often misused as legitimacy shortcuts or URL shorteners when other solutions would be more flexible. Designers should avoid registering well-known URIs unless their protocol genuinely requires a site-wide discovery mechanism.