

Humans.txt, like robots.txt, but for humans. - whalesalad
http://humanstxt.org/

======
corin_
Why does <http://humanstxt.org/H-team.php> exist, surely they should just link
straight to <http://humanstxt.org/humans.txt>!

Anyway, pointless initiative. Can't help but think that this feels like a
project you create in the hope of getting attention from people saying writing
blogs about them trying to start something new, not in the hope of it
_actually_ taking off. I mean, robots.txt makes sense because robots know to
look for it. It _obviously_ makes 100x more sense to have a hyperlink to an
"about us" or "who's behind this site?" page with a URL of their choice, if
it's designed for people to read. Oh, and many, many sites already do that.

~~~
Vivtek
I think this is an attempt to create a soopersekrit easter egg standard so
that the guys who write a site can pat each other on the back without the
customer needing to know about it.

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panic
_What is it?_ _An initiative to know the creators of the website. A TXT file
that contains the information about the different people who have contributed
to the web building._

Robots.txt specifies a set of URLs that automated crawlers are not supposed to
access. I'm not sure how this is "like robots.txt, but for humans".

~~~
Zev
My guess is that the theory behind this is - Robots.txt : File that robots
look for, to get certain kinds of information about a site :: Humans.txt :
File that people look for, certain kinds of to get information about a site.

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jpadvo
I'm kind of surprised at all the grumpy comments -- this idea made me smile.

I like the idea of a team leaving their collective signature in a hidden-away
corner of a website. The semi-secrecy (after all, how many people are ever
going to read a websites humans.txt?) and feeling of ownership that this gives
is really neat.

My projects are getting a humans.txt!

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noibl
_The idea of hard coding a URI, like is done for robots.txt is a bad idea.
Let's not continue to make the same mistakes over and over again._ \--
<http://bitworking.org/news/No_Fishing>

Fair comment here[1] about the specific case of robots.txt, but lets not do
this kind of thing gratuitously.

Maybe what we need instead is the X-BOFH header[2]:

    
    
      X-BOFH: http://www.xxxxx.de/bofh/xxxxxx.html
      The actual URL it points to has been obscured to 
      protect the guilty, and a local mirror[3] provided in its stead.
    

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639337>

[2] [http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-
http-h...](http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers)

[3] <http://www.nextthing.org/blog/cache/bofh_edited.html>

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Emore
How many people does it take to put up a website promoting a txt-file addition
to webroot? 5, apparently. Next up they'll take millions in VC, integrate with
Facebook and write blog posts on it all. </sarcasm>

Somehow a balance should be kept between technology involved and ego show-off:

Static webpage: barely qualifies for even any credit.

Contains sign-up form: a minimal "About" page.

Asks for personal info: names and credible external links.

Charges you money: add photos of yourselves and references.

Etcetera.

~~~
reitzensteinm
That was my first thought, but apparently it's seven!

<http://humanstxt.org/humans.txt>

No wonder they're looking for a standard way to structure author information -
they're generating so much of it that it'll soon become unweildy.

------
mrspeaker
I thought these guys had ripped off my revolutionary idea "humans.txt":
<http://www.mrspeaker.net/2010/07/15/humans-txt/>

But it turns out they were trying to do something useful, not devise a system
for preventing pesky humans from wasting precious robot bandwidth.

I think I like my idea better though.

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tuhin
"like robots.txt, but for humans" This is indeed nothing but a marketing/PR
gimmick. The only connotation that I could think of was that like Robots.txt
has to do something with robots, this has something to do with Humans.

Utility: I won't go on to say it is completely useless. While many sites have
an about or colophon section, they end up naming people who are most active or
at the top of the ladder. What about facebook with so many employees? That is
where I see this essentially being used. As I tweeted, it is more like the
Credits section for the web.

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randrews
I like this, but I think that any site that implements it will have the same
result Netscape did: <http://www.jwz.org/doc/about.html>

~~~
jpadvo
It sounds like the "bickering" at Netscape over their about:authors page was
simply the result of having a culture where people would bicker about things
like the details of an about:authors page.

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Legion
As many have pointed out, this is not really analogous to robots.txt.

The first thing I imagined was a text file that said stuff like, "Don't read
anything in the Features section. Also, don't try to use the admin login
panel!"

But really, what this idea should be called is developers.txt.

I thought it was a silly idea, until someone else here talked about it
providing a way of verifying work. Anyone can post a website with screen
captures of other sites, and claim they worked on them. Even if the site does
list a developer firm in the footer, as long as I worked there, I can claim to
have worked on that site.

A developers.txt file like their example would make for a verifiable list of
the people who actually worked on the site, in a way that does not add clutter
to the actual content.

I know clients we work with probably don't want us putting all our names on
their About page, but would have no problems with a developers.txt file that
normal users are never going to see.

------
richbradshaw
I see this being useful for future developers – the number of sites I've taken
over with no idea who made it or how to get server access etc. Having an easy
way to find out how to contact would make things much better than having to
wget everything each time.

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whyworryagain
One major flaw of this approach is that people who currently have control of
the site will edit out the people who worked on the site before. The only way
to do it fool-proof is to use a service like <http://creatorfinder.com> they
store a history of creators and also allow all your verified portfolio for a
creator to be displayed.

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wyclif
I'd rather not speculate as to the usefulness of this, but I do know one
thing: the English here is off and needs to be cleaned up (I realise the
authors are Spanish).

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bl4k
robots.txt is meant to be read by robots, hence the markup and location.

for humans just use normal web pages. like an 'about' page, for example

~~~
qntm
Perhaps humans.txt would suggest which kinds of humans should and should not
visit this site. Under-18s, for example.

~~~
Mithrandir
It's about the _developers_ , not the users.

~~~
qntm
I know what it _is_ about. I'm suggesting a humans.txt which actually makes a
decent analogy with robots.txt.

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hippich
For some reason I believe if this will take off it will be used by robots not
humans..

~~~
lostbit
Agreed. After some time there would be a database and a ranking with web site
authors, skills, languages, etc. Interested people would look into it to find
people that match their type of site design...

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jawee
Didn´t something like this used to be achieved with meta tags anyway? I
remember when it was common to have meta tags with author names, editors (I
have often seem the generator often used on many WYSIWYG editors assigned to
the author´s text editor), and contact information.

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rahoulb
(Slightly tangential but) I like this:
<http://www.thinkvisibility.com/robots.txt>

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nhebb
What if I dream electric sheep? Do I add androids.txt?

~~~
iamdave
+10 Phillip K Dick points to you, sir

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coderdude
There is something _like_ this for advertising the contact information for a
site. It's called info.txt.

<http://www.aota.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-18373.html>

It looks like this (erroneously named robots.txt by this site owner):
<http://www.melodilerim.com/robots.txt>

------
yeahsure
I like the idea of giving the developers/designers/copywrites/whatever some
credit, however, I doubt this is the way it should be done. Most web
designers/developers/agencies already place a link in the website's footer so
it's not that hard to know who was involved.

------
there
i love the irony in reading "We Are People, Not Machines." just as the font-
face css loaded and converted the entire page from a human-readable variable-
width font to a machine-like fixed-width font.

------
adulau
_From their humans.txt file, Chef:Juanjo Bernabeu_

I don't understand the key value format used if this is for human. It would
have been more appropriate to use a format like "The Chef is" if this is for a
human-being. Or is the file to be read by robots to treat better human?

In other words, I don't know if this initiative will really help us to
preserve the three laws of robotics -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics> .

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Ruudjah
Horrible idea. You move the "about" page to some monospace non-marked up page.

This just creates an excuse not to make a dcent "about"page.

~~~
j05h
When doing contract work, you don't normally get credit for a site on the
about page. Sometimes you may get permission to add a footer link. I think
this is great for those situations where you don't get either. My hope would
be that most companies would not mind a simple text file in the root which
isn't linked anywhere but is well-known.

My portfolio of sites becomes verifiable. Yes, I built these sites, and here
are the humans.txt files to prove it.

I've been at plenty of companies and built many sites and can't really prove I
had hand in putting building any of them.

~~~
limmeau
You could encode a fingerprint of a signing key in a comment tag and offer to
sign doubtful peoples' nonces with that key.

------
LordLandon
Oh, are we trying to make it easier for spambots to harvest our email
addresses now?

~~~
jrockway
Spambots already have your email address. Get a filter.

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thetylerhayes
All the comments and suggestions here are good. One more: why not just use the
meta tags for this same purpose? Then you don't even need to create another
file.

There's already an 'author' meta name attribute for instance, and you can
define your own on-the-fly too.

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jrockway
This is probably the dumbest thing I've ever seen on HN. I'm going to flag it
and pretend that this was just a very bad dream.

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realdealrep
why you copy what @smashingmagazine tweet??? twitter stealer!!

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mmaunder
Oh god.

