web-archive.txt is an open specification for web archive interoperability, defining a human- and machine-readable plain-text descriptor published via the Well-Known URI pattern (RFC8615). It provides a consistent way for web archives to publish identity, scope and access interfaces while enabling discovery and verification of programmatic endpoints.

No single web archive holds the web, so any serious claim about the web’s past must draw on several. Yet web archives remain hard to find and harder to compare: each implements shared protocols in its own way and documents them unevenly, if at all. Central registries have tried to fill this gap and repeatedly fallen out of date, because they rely on someone other than the archive to keep them current. web-archive.txt leaves that responsibility with the archive itself. It asks archives not to become alike, only to state their differences consistently. Interoperability then comes from making difference legible rather than erasing it.