Humans.txt

[FONT=Georgia]So here’s one for you.

I’ve been reviewing my standard meta tags today, prior to 2014, removing the outdated ones and adding new ones like viewport, Facebook’s Open Graph and Twitter’s.

When I got to my author meta tag though, I had a semantic conundrum. Customarily I’d use this tag to sign myself as being the coder of the webpage, but I realised that the tag should be better suited to credit the author of the copy.

Some googling lead me to a site with an interesting idea on how to credit everyone involved in a website. They’d like to start the practice of creating a humans.txt file, linked in the metadata, where all contributors can be listed. Here, have a look!

I’ll be trying it out on my next website.

I love the idea and the objective, although I feel the implementation is a little clunky.

What do you think of this idea?

Do you think it would catch on?[/FONT]

I like it. Whether or not it catches on, who knows? Seems many have an aversion to spending time and effort on documentation.

I’m sure if it does catch on the standards will evolve.

The only thing I’ve seen remotely like this is gettext PO headers http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
And even then, many of the language files I’ve seen don’t follow a consistent syntax and even omit some entirely.

It’s a nice idea. I might try that too.

Off Topic:

Funny how the word ‘humans’ sounds weirder and weirder the more you say it. :-/

Well, I think … in fact it is the Colophon of the site. :slight_smile:

So why not create a colophon page, that can be linked to the “site made by …” link which is often at the bottom of the (home) page?
Instead of directly pointing to the site of the webmaker, it can go to the colophon page: were (among others) the link to the webmaker’s company can be included, and of the photographer(s), copywriters, etc.
Better for SEO and PR (public relations in this case) too! :smiley:

Such a colophon page can be as simple as the txt-file above, but then as html-file so links can be clicked; it can get more attention if it’s in the design of the site.
And you can make it as attractive as you want.

  • Example: [U]colophon page[/U].
    Here it is the colophon of an exposition *), but this kind of things can be made for a site as well.

*) Dutch title means: “Sparks for a fire”.

Edit
Oops, example was made some years ago, working in FF and IE7 at that time; doesn’t work in Chrome now…

Edit Edit
Oops oops, lack of short memory. :blush: - Forgotten I had disabled js in Chrome yesterday for testing an other page. Chrome is ok! :smiley:
For the list “Stupid mistakes we all made sometimes”. :wink:
Shall we make a topic for that?

But lesson 1 in Javascript is (as I often say): “Javascript has to be unobtrusive: The page should work without javascript too”. :lol:
Repaired! :slight_smile:

[FONT=Georgia]It looks like the practice is already pretty popular.

Check this out: http://www.google.com/humans.txt

There’re online generators: http://humanstxt-creator.org/

And Wordpress plugins too. I just did a web search and got three million results.[/FONT]

I didn’t even know ‘colophon’ was a word!

The word “colophon” is coming from the publishing world. [U]This example[/U] is pretty like a humans.text. :slight_smile:
In books, the colophon often includes the copyright notice.
See: [U]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colophon_(publishing)[/U] and some beautiful examples in the images tab of [URL=“https://www.google.com/search?q=example+colophon+page”][U]google.com/search?q=example+colophon+page[/U].

Maybe the word “imprint” is more common in English (it’s not my native language).

I think this way is more telling than the [U]google.com/humans.txt[/U], and more user friendly than this [URL=“https://github.com/humans.txt”][U]github.com/humans.txt[/U]. :wink:

In Germany the humans.txt/colophon/imprint is called “Impressum”, and for websites it’s even a legally mandated statement:

  • “The Telemediengesetz (‘Telemedia Act’) requires that German websites must disclose information about the publisher, including their name and address, telephone number or e-mail address, trade registry number, VAT number, and other information depending on the type of company.
    German websites are defined as being published by individuals or organisations that are based in Germany, so an Impressum is required regardless of whether a site is in the .de domain.” ([U]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum[/U])
  • As far as I know, German websites do it always in a normal webpage (for instance [U]messefrankfurt.com/…/impressum[/U])

It’s a good practice, and something I was unaware of until now.

(And) Now I have a new word to use, abuse and make use of.

This is good good to know, Francky. Thank’s for passing this on … I may be just getting my feet wet in the Web Development world, but I might as well make it a habit to put this into practice.