Minor ads.txt specification correction

[Julian Berman]

Hello All.

I'm mid-authoring of a crawler, and just glancing through the spec in a bit more detail than before. Section 3.1 says

The declarations must be accessible via HTTP and/or HTTPS [2] from the website that the instructions are to be applied to under a standard relative path on the server host: "/ads.txt" and and HTTP request header containing "Content-Type: text/plain". It may be advisable to additionally use "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8" to signal UTF8 support.

 

but I assume it actually means to refer to the Accept header (and possibly Accept-Encoding), not Content-Type on the request side of things.

I also am a tiny bit skeptical of the paragraph below it:

Other HTTP status codes such as HTTP 302 redirects are not supported, a future version may address delegating authority to a third-party web server to publish the data.

I have a feeling that in the wild, at least a few publisher sites will have sorts of global redirects with absolutely nothing hosted on the root, e.g. to redirect to a www subdomain etc. I think I'm likely to implement redirect following just to not have to think about it.

(Sidebar: this is the appropriate place for these sorts of things I hope? https://iabtechlab.com/blog/industry-aligns-to-adopt-ads-txt-specification/ seems to mention that there's an ads.txt slack channel. Is that public, or available to members of this list? I can't seem to find any other mention of it anywhere in a 30 second Google search.)

Cheers,

-Julian

[Julian Berman]

Yeah on second read maybe all that was bugging me there was replacing "HTTP request header" with "HTTP response header", but curious to hear any comments on the other part of that.

-J