---
title: About txtfirst
desc: Who is behind the proposal, what it is not, and how it is funded.
order: 9
---

# About

txtfirst is an open proposal for how content sites should be built when a large share
of their readers are programs. It is maintained by an independent developer working on
travel, hospitality and search, and it started because a measurement of twenty five
hotel websites came back worse than expected.

## What this is not

It is not a product, a company, a SaaS, or a standards body. Nothing here is for sale
and there is nothing to sign up for. There is no certification and there will not be
one, because a compliance badge nobody audits is worth less than a `curl` command
anyone can run.

## Funding and conflicts

Unfunded. No sponsors, no affiliate links on this domain, no advertising. The author
builds and operates content sites that would benefit if txtfirst were adopted widely,
which is a conflict of interest and is disclosed here rather than buried.

## Licence

Everything on this domain, including the spec, the reference implementation and the
research data, is released under CC0 1.0. Use it commercially, fork it, rename it,
ship it without credit. If the ideas survive under someone else's name, the proposal
worked.

## Contributing

The spec is version 0.1 and the open questions are listed at the bottom of
[spec](/spec). Disagreement is more useful than agreement right now, particularly on
R2 and on whether R4 is too strict to be adopted.

Reach the author through [contact](/contact).