Building the Web for Agents: A Declarative Framework for Agent-Web Interaction
The increasing deployment of autonomous AI agents on the web is hampered by a fundamental misalignment: agents must infer affordances from human-oriented user interfaces, leading to brittle, inefficient, and insecure interactions. To address this, we introduce VOIX, a web-native framework that enables websites to expose reliable, auditable, and privacy-preserving capabilities for AI agents through simple, declarative HTML elements. VOIX introduces <tool> and <context> tags, allowing developers to explicitly define available actions and relevant state, thereby creating a clear, machine-readable contract for agent behavior. This approach shifts control to the website developer while preserving user privacy by disconnecting the conversational interactions from the website. We evaluated the framework's practicality, learnability, and expressiveness in a three-day hackathon study with 16 developers. The results demonstrate that participants, regardless of prior experience, were able to rapidly build diverse and functional agent-enabled web applications. Ultimately, this work provides a foundational mechanism for realizing the Agentic Web, enabling a future of seamless and secure human-AI collaboration on the web.
691b15346bfd5965c0fd36f2
Sven Schultze
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2025-11-20T08:50:12.961Z
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/avatars/5f905f6ac52a231a15ea755c710613b3.svg
Sven Schultze 
svenschultze
user
svenschultze
691b15346bfd5965c0fd36f3
Meike Verena Kietzmann
691b15346bfd5965c0fd36f4
Nils-Lucas Schönfeld
691b15346bfd5965c0fd36f5
Ruth Stock-Homburg
Building the Web for Agents: A Declarative Framework for Agent-Web Interaction
The increasing deployment of autonomous AI agents on the web is hampered by a fundamental misalignment: agents must infer affordances from human-oriented user interfaces, leading to brittle, inefficient, and insecure interactions. To address this, we introduce VOIX, a web-native framework that enables websites to expose reliable, auditable, and privacy-preserving capabilities for AI agents through simple, declarative HTML elements. VOIX introduces <tool> and <context> tags, allowing developers to explicitly define available actions and relevant state, thereby creating a clear, machine-readable contract for agent behavior. This approach shifts control to the website developer while preserving user privacy by disconnecting the conversational interactions from the website. We evaluated the framework's practicality, learnability, and expressiveness in a three-day hackathon study with 16 developers. The results demonstrate that participants, regardless of prior experience, were able to rapidly build diverse and functional agent-enabled web applications. Ultimately, this work provides a foundational mechanism for realizing the Agentic Web, enabling a future of seamless and secure human-AI collaboration on the web.
VOIX is a web-native framework that enables reliable and privacy-preserving interactions between AI agents and human-oriented user interfaces using declarative HTML elements.
VOIX <tool> tag <context> tag Agentic Web