I’ve been reviewing my standard meta tags today, prior to 2014, removing the outdated ones and adding new ones like viewport, Facebook’s Open Graph and Twitter’s.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.
Well, I think … in fact it is the Colophon of the site.
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!
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. - Forgotten I had disabled js in Chrome yesterday for testing an other page. Chrome is ok!
For the list “Stupid mistakes we all made sometimes”.
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”.
Repaired!
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])
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.