What if we just

What if a better answer to a question I've been struggling with for more than a decade is just... Way simpler? Sharing a potentially half-baked idea for discussion.

Back in 2013 I wrote Dropping the F-Bomb on Web Standards. The core argument was simple: the web works best when developers can invent “slang,” and standards bodies behave more like dictionary editors — watching what people actually say, then paving the cow paths that clearly matter.

It fed into the Extensible Web Manifesto (which followed) and over the years I've continued to push for study of what people are really doing. I have helped add features to the HTTPArchive crawl and built tools to analyze this data.

But it's hard. It's biased. It's incomplete. Even the best crawl misses huge swaths of the web — anything behind logins, paywalls, dashboards, internal tools, or private deployments. And all of them have limits. It requires a ton of follow-up analysis and raises almost as many questions as it answers.

So lately I've been wondering (a bit like Kramer):

What if we just... voluntarily shared this information?

We don't need a formal standard or anyone's permission, we could just... share it, and build tools to share it easily in a well known format at a well known URL.

It could give us insight into the use of custom elements behind logins and paywalls and so on too, and tell us where they come from (a git repo, for example)...

Lots of things that are common happened through community effort and adoption. Normally you get something from it - robots.txt helped your site from being aggressively scraped in problematic ways, ads.txt helped say something about monetization, feed.rss helped syndicate, and so on. What do you get out of sharing this kind of info?

Individually, I'm not sure. But, collectively the benefit is clear: We'd finally have a real, ecosystem‑wide index of custom elements and how they're used. and hopefully a way to shape useful standards on them easily.

As to what that would look like, I'm not sure.

The community defined Custom Element Manifest already has a bit of uptake and tooling - we could just publish that to a well known URL. It might be too much, or too little.. A simpler manifest of just element names and URLs of packages/repositories that supply them would even be nice.

Is it too much? Too little? Maybe.

Is it worth trying? I think so.

What do you think? Is this worth trying somehow?