A proposal for a web content architecture where markdown is the source of truth, agents are first-class citizens, and access policy is expressed through price.
Status: Draft · Seeking community feedback
Authors: Gary Walker / BitCryptic™ · Graham Hall / Slepner
AI agents are now among the most frequent consumers of web content, yet the web serves them HTML — a format built for human eyes. Agents must strip navigation, ads, scripts, and layout markup to reach the content underneath, wasting 5–10× the tokens actually needed. MDF proposes a simple, open architecture to fix this: markdown as the canonical source, HTTP content negotiation for delivery, and an optional payment layer that doubles as access policy.
- Markdown-first authoring — markdown is the source of truth; HTML is rendered from it for browsers, not the other way around
- Native agent serving —
Accept: text/markdownreturns clean markdown at the same URL, no conversion middleware required - Structured discovery —
/mdf.jsonadvertises capabilities, pricing, and content signals in a machine-readable format that agents can query before fetching - Price as access policy — a single price field unifies open access, micropayment, and private/authenticated access into one continuous spectrum, using the x402 (EVM/stablecoin) and L402 (Bitcoin/Lightning) payment standards
| Price | What it means |
|---|---|
$0.00 |
Open — serve immediately, no payment required |
$0.0001 |
Micropayment — small per-fetch fee offsets creator costs; cheaper for AI operators than fetching and parsing HTML |
$1.00+ |
Premium — meaningful payment for gated content |
$100.00+ |
Private — payment triggers an auth token issuance rather than immediate delivery |
Servers performing on-server markdown conversion may also report the size reduction between the original HTML and the served markdown directly in the response — giving agents a concrete efficiency signal alongside the price itself, rather than requiring them to price a request in the dark. See the concept document's Response Value Signalling section for details.
The concept document covers the full architecture, existing partial solutions, open questions, and the reference implementation plan.
- Concept document published
-
mdf.schema.json— JSON Schema for/mdf.json - Reference implementation —
bitcryptic/mdf-serveron Docker Hub (bitcryptic-gw/mdf-reference-server) - Demo site — https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com — live end-to-end demonstration of all three payment tiers
- x402 payment verification stub (EVM/stablecoin rail)
- L402 payment verification stub (Bitcoin/Lightning rail)
- Atom feed with
mdf:change_typenamespace — live at https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com/feed.xml - Validator CLI —
bitcryptic-gw/mdf-validator - On-chain x402 payment verification (stub → production)
- Lightning invoice verification for L402 (stub → production)
A reference implementation is publicly deployed at https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com
Try it now:
# Discover the site's MDF capabilities
curl https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com/mdf.json
# Fetch the agent index
curl https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com/llms.txt
# Request markdown directly (agent-style)
curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com/
# Free content — no payment required
curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com/docs/getting-started
# Paid content — returns 402 with payment instructions
curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com/premium/deep-dive
# Private content — returns 402 with auth endpoint hint
curl https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com/private/internals
# Atom feed with mdf:change_type metadata
curl https://mdf-demo.bitcryptic.com/feed.xmlThe demo site exercises all three payment tiers and the full auth-via-payment flow. Both x402 (EVM) and L402 (Lightning) payment rails are stubbed — no real transaction is required to explore the protocol behaviour.
A WordPress plugin that tracks AI agent traffic and Accept: text/markdown requests to your site, with a dashboard showing estimated earnings from MDF-enabled content. Phase 1 of a planned full MDF integration for WordPress including wallet connection and automatic markdown generation.
→ bitcryptic-gw/mdf-analytics-wp
This is an early-stage community proposal. The open questions section of the concept document is a good starting point for discussion.
- Discuss: Open an issue
- Implement: Build an MDF-compatible server or client and link it here
- Challenge: If you think this is wrong, redundant, or misses something — say so
MIT