Designing content for two audiences, humans and AI systems.
Machine Experience (MX) is the practice of designing content so it remains readable for people whilst also being discoverable and predictable for machines. As AI systems increasingly search, summarise, transform, and act on information, content needs clearer structure, stable meaning, and metadata that travels with it.
MX focuses on conventions that are practical to implement across platforms. It is not a product and it is not tied to a single vendor. The goal is simple: content that humans can read, and machines can reliably interpret.
Why MX
The web now has a dual audience. Humans read for understanding, machines read for extraction and action. When structure is inconsistent, machines guess, and systems become fragile. MX reduces ambiguity by defining shared conventions for structure, metadata, and versioned meaning.
What MX Covers
- Document structure (sections, headings, relationships)
- Metadata (authorship, status, version, provenance)
- Stable identifiers (so references survive change)
- Clear definitions and terminology (so meaning is consistent)
- Examples and test cases (so conformance is measurable)
What MX Is Not
- a new file format
- a replacement for HTML or Markdown
- a proprietary platform
- a claim that machines matter more than people
How It Relates to The Gathering
The Gathering develops open MX standards in public. Drafts are proposed, reviewed, and ratified as versioned standards through Stream, so teams can implement the same conventions consistently.
Get involved
There is no membership in The Gathering. You can read drafts and follow progress openly. Accounts exist in Stream for practical reasons (attribution, anti-spam, and process history) and are needed to comment, propose changes, or signal consensus.
