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add(foundations): WebSub — push notification for feeds - #136

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add(foundations): WebSub — push notification for feeds#136
jdevalk wants to merge 1 commit into
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add/websub-2026-07-30

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@jdevalk

@jdevalk jdevalk commented Jul 30, 2026

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What changed

New spec page: foundations/websub — the publisher's side of WebSub. Advertise rel="hub" and rel="self" on your feed, ping the hub on publish, and subscribers get pushed each update instead of polling for it.

Also in this PR:

Why now

Found by the daily standards scan sweeping the W3C TR index. WebSub was republished as a W3C Recommendation on 2 June 2026, adding cross-site-scripting mitigations to its Security Considerations (subscribers must serve the intent-verification response with a safe media type and X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff). The repo covers feed discovery and feed hygiene but had no page on the push half of the story — grep -ri websub src/content returned nothing.

Why it earns a page

Per the scan's "auditable website outcome, not build technique" rule: rel="hub" and rel="self" are IANA-registered link relations served in your Link headers or feed, so the capability is checkable from outside the site. The "Why it matters" is phrased for subscribers and agents, not for the developer — latency drops from polling interval / 2 to seconds, and the polling traffic that dominates most feed URLs disappears.

Status

optional. It only applies if you publish a feed and have a hub to point at; the web platform contract does not break without it. Same bar as image-sitemaps and idn-support.

Note for the maintainer

This site does not ship a WebSub hub, so the page carries no worked-example callout. Reading it against "ship it before you spec it": WebSub is not a brand-new convention needing us to prove feasibility — it has been a W3C Recommendation since 2018 and descends from PubSubHubbub (2009) — and the repo already documents plenty of established standards the site itself doesn't implement (well-known/webauthn, well-known/oauth-authorization-server, well-known/apple-app-site-association, accessibility/captions-and-transcripts). If you read that rule more strictly, say so and I'll close this in favour of a Slack flag.

The page deliberately covers only the publisher's obligations, so the 2026 XSS mitigation — a subscriber obligation — is the "why now" rather than page content.

Sources

  1. WebSub — W3C Recommendation, 2 June 2026 (primary)
  2. IANA Link Relation Types registryhub and self registrations
  3. RFC 8288 — Web Linking

Verification

  • npm run build passes; 165 pages indexed.
  • Page appears on /spec/foundations/, /checklist/ and in /llms.txt.
  • All four inline /spec/<category>/<slug>/ cross-links confirmed against the target files' actual directories and against the built dist/ output.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

WebSub was republished as a W3C Recommendation on 2 June 2026 (new XSS
mitigations in Security Considerations), and the repo had no page for it
despite covering feed discovery and feed hygiene. rel="hub" and
rel="self" are both IANA-registered link relations and auditable from
outside the site, so this is a website property rather than a build
technique.

Status: optional — it only applies if you publish a feed and have a hub
to point at; the platform does not break without it.

- new page src/content/spec/foundations/websub.md (order 130, after
  feed-discovery/110 and feed-hygiene/120)
- relatedSlugs wired on feed-discovery, feed-hygiene and link-headers
- changelog entry 2026-07-30-websub.md
- OG images regenerated; SKILL.md page count 164 -> 165 + digest resigned

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Deploying specification-website with  Cloudflare Pages  Cloudflare Pages

Latest commit: 8158548
Status: ✅  Deploy successful!
Preview URL: https://facbe98e.specification-website.pages.dev
Branch Preview URL: https://add-websub-2026-07-30.specification-website.pages.dev

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