Adoption Thesis · Requirements
Requirements for a Viable Protocol
For MSP-1 to deserve adoption, it must satisfy a set of practical, technical, and editorial requirements. This section makes those requirements explicit.
1. Stability and backwards compatibility
Implementers should not fear that future protocol revisions will break current deployments. MSP-1 MUST:
- Preserve existing term meanings wherever possible.
- Introduce breaking changes only with clear versioning and migration guidance.
- Avoid churn in core profiles and identity semantics.
2. Implementation neutrality
MSP-1 MUST work across different stacks and scales:
- Static sites, CMS platforms, and custom frameworks.
- Small individual sites and large organizations.
- Hosted and self-managed environments.
No single vendor, platform, or tool should be required to adopt MSP-1.
3. Human-aligned editorial expectations
MSP-1 MUST be realistic about human workflows:
- Support partial, phased adoption.
- Allow different verification levels for different content types.
- Accommodate mixed human/AI authorship models.
4. Machine readability and clarity
MSP-1 MUST be straightforward for AI agents and tools to consume:
- Consistent JSON-LD patterns.
- Clear linkage between site, page, and provenance profiles.
- Explicit typing and documented fields.
5. Practicality over perfection
Above all, MSP-1 MUST be practical. A protocol that is theoretically appealing but impossible to implement in real teams and systems would fail its own adoption thesis.