What is Humans.txt?
Humans.txt is an interesting initiative by a ten-legged, Barcelona-based web team that aims to give credit to the contributors of a website. As the name suggests, Humans.txt is a plain text file. The name stems from the robots.txt file, the metafile that supplies search engines with additional information about the website. A small standard exists, but you’re not required to follow it. This article is a reflection on the philosophy and use cases for humans.txt, its potential and adoption on the web. For more technical details about Humans.txt, you can visit the web team's homepage or this Perishable Press article.
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| The relationship between R2 and C3PO has never been this easy |
The web as a Great Digital Book Library
At the internet's inception, the terms and concepts being used online were borrowed from the glossary of the print industry (and a myriad of other existing real-world jargons). Famously, a website consists of different webpages, often with pagination (like in the case of blogs). And much like in newspapers, the content of a webpage that is visible on screen without scrolling, is said to be ‘above the fold’. We ‘bookmark’ websites we want to revisit later on, et cetera. Why then is Humans.txt such a recent idea, when it is in essence just a metaphorical representation of a literary work’s colophon? These have been in vogue since the 15th century, and have become an integral part of books. Counterintuitively, no one had thought of transposing the colophon to the web until latterly… |
| Colophons have been used in books ever since the 15th century |
Humans.txt’ authority on the web
“Should we assume that humans.txt came too late to become widely adopted?”
Given that the general opinion on the web today is shifting away from the idea that a webpage is similar to a page from a book, – which coincidentally opens up a lot of possibilities for creative design – , should we assume that humans.txt simply came too late to become widely adopted? Only time will tell. One thing is certain however: if web leaders adopt humans.txt, the initiative will undoubtedly take off; and if you’re a proponent of humans.txt, you will be happy to learn that Google, Flickr and HTML5 Boilerplate are already utilizing it.But what do the official facts & figures tell us? According to trends.builtwith.com, fewer than 30.000 websites worldwide have used, or are using humans.txt. That’s a substantial amount sure, but it means very little in terms of web popularity, seeing as it represents less than 1% of the entire worldwide web. If humans.txt is aiming to become the more or less standardized way of accrediting website contributors, it is still a long way off. One of the next steps could be attempting to get a recommendation from the W3C, a feat that would help boost its popularity and establish its authority.
Why Humans.txt and not Humans.html?
As a comment discussion in the Perishable Press article about Humans.txt pointed out, many webdesigners, developers & others working within the confines of the web might wonder: why humans.TXT and not humans.HTML? After all, humans.html could use a more stylized CSS lay-out and greater readability. However, humans.txt should be to a website what a colophon is to literary works: an official, content-only reference with production notes about the website in question. This renders CSS Styling obsolete. If a document is of an official nature, it should moreover be devoid of any possible malicious loopholes: an HTML file would allow for Javascript, Flash and Java-applets to compromise its security. This is why the project team wanted the meta-information to be separate from and not intrusive to the code.A Human-Centered Web Approach
“The initiative puts humans in the center of importance”
Efficiency and ease of implementation also need to be taken into consideration. To get the initiative to be more widely and quickly adopted, the extra task of creating a meta file about the website shouldn't be laborious. And what is less straining than a plain ol’ text file that can be written in the span of a few minutes? As stated on humans.txt’s homepage, the initiative puts humans in the center of importance (as opposed to digital pages).Ultimately, everything on the web is created by and for humans, not for machines. It is no wonder then that the idea originated as a complementarity to ‘robots.txt’, a website’s meta file for search engines. Shame on us for prioritizing machines!!
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| Before Humans.txt, we privileged informing machines over people |
The possible advantages of Humans.txt
“Humans.txt presents advantages for both contributors and potential employers”
Humans.txt aims to become the default way of accrediting website contributors. This opens up the possibility for contributors to establish a more solid name/brand on the web.If I for example were a marketeer looking for web talent for a new website, I could inspect a list of websites using Humans.txt, and simply save the humans.txt files of the websites that looked the most appealing and most fitting for my company.
Humans.txt doesn't just provide an official way to give credit to the website contributors, it also presents an advantage for potentially interested website visitors. Suppose I were an entrepreneur, if I were to genuinely like a website design, I would be able to immediately find accurate contact information on the people I would perhaps like to contract/ work with using the humans.txt support button. If humans.txt gains enough traction, potential clients will have an easier time contacting the right people and both agencies and freelancers will see an increase in employment.
trends.builtwith.com recognized this potential and has already published a list of websites using Humans.txt, intended exactly for the above-stated purpose. It is available as a free download at their website.
HumansWhoMade.com is another online humans.txt-website listing directory. Both of these could propogate themselves as useful resources in the search for valuable web talent.
Why you should use Humans.txt too
As Humans.txt’s popularity slowly rises and its presence becomes more and more evident, visitors who are aware of this will eventually be able to look for it at http://yourdomain.something/humans.txt. This means that if you don’t have a humans.txt file on your website, you’ll get a lot of 404 ‘Page not found’ errors, leaving your visitors puzzled and wondering where the info is they were looking for.What do you think about humans.txt? How bright is its future, really? Will it eventually become the standard? Do you laud this initiative or think it should be revised?
Written & illustrated by Kevin Van Lierde
Edited by Nicolas De Keyser
Edited by Nicolas De Keyser