Reading the MCP Specification
The specification is normative text, not a tutorial: a MUST decides an implementation, a SHOULD leaves room for judgment, and a feature's Deprecated state tells you exactly how long you can still rely on it. Navigate the specification's structure: which parts every implementation MUST support and which are added as needed. Read RFC 2119 and RFC 8174 keyword strength correctly, including the rule that lowercase words carry no normative weight. Explain the relationship between schema.ts and schema.json, and why the TypeScript file is the source of truth. Tell a Draft, Current, or Final revision apart from a feature's own Active, Deprecated, or Removed state. Trace a changelog entry back to the SEP that produced it, and compute a Deprecated feature's earliest removal from its window. Every fact in this curriculum traces back to one document: the specification at modelcontextprotocol.io, built from a TypeScript schema. A team that learns MCP from a blog post, from a training run whose data predates the current revision, or from memory of an earlier release drifts away from what the specification actually requires, and the exam is written against the specification, not against what used to be true. An implementation that remembered the 2025-06-18 revision correctly and never reread the current text would still get 2026-07-28 wrong, because a MUST from an older revision can…
Reading the MCP Specification: The specification is normative text, not a tutorial: a MUST decides an implementation, a SHOULD leaves room for judgment, and a…
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