Name overlap + collaboration opportunity: two AWP specs addressing different layers

[dbhurley]

Hi - I came across this repo today and wanted to reach out directly because I think there is a naming overlap worth addressing, and more importantly a genuine collaboration opportunity.

The overlap

I am David Hurley, founder of Plasmate Labs. We published an Agent Web Protocol specification earlier this year that defines a 7-method interaction protocol for AI agents browsing the web: navigate, snapshot, click, type, scroll, select, extract. It is the protocol layer built into Plasmate, our open source headless browser for AI agents.

We are both calling our work AWP — Agent Web Protocol.

The good news: these are different layers

After reading your spec, I do not think we are actually competing. Your agent.json is a discovery and declaration layer — websites publish what capabilities they expose to agents. Plasmate's AWP is an interaction layer — how agents instruct a browser to act on any page, whether or not that page publishes agent.json.

These fit together naturally:

agent.json (your spec)   →  what can I do on this site?
AWP interaction layer    →  execute those actions via a browser

A well-designed agent pipeline would use agent.json to discover available actions on sites that publish it, and fall back to the interaction layer (navigate, click, extract) on sites that do not. The two specs are complementary.

A coordination opportunity

I am a participant in the W3C Web Content for Browser and AI Community Group, which is working on exactly this space — how web content should be structured and declared for AI agent consumers. That community group is the right venue to align both specs under a common framework, coordinate naming, and work toward standards that tool builders and publishers can both implement.

A few things worth discussing:

1. Naming: having two published specs both named AWP will cause confusion as both gain adoption. Worth coordinating on either a shared name or clearly differentiated names (e.g. AWP-Discovery and AWP-Interaction, or different names entirely)
2. Layering: documenting how the two specs complement each other would help developers understand the full stack
3. W3C path: if you want this to become a proper web standard rather than a community-governed repo, the W3C CG is the path. Happy to introduce you to the group.

Next step

Would you be open to a conversation? You can reach me at the email in my GitHub profile, or open a thread here. I would rather align early than have two competing AWP specs confuse the ecosystem.

— David Hurley
Plasmate Labs / dbhurley.com / @dbhurley