The Web, made by Humans

During my recent blogging revival I’ve already written about how I love the web[1]. I’ve also commented a couple of times about uses of AI and Large Language Models and the kinds of confusion that can be caused.

Today, I noticed an exchange between the brilliant Sara Joy and Stefan Bohacek on Mastodon, in which Stefan accidentally reminded me of something interesting that I hadn’t properly explored the first time around.

Rewind

About 20 years ago – actually 24 years ago, according to this Wikipedia article – there was a thing called FOAF, or Friend-of-a-Friend, an early online vocabularly / ontology for describing relationships between people and things online. There was also a related concept called DOAP, Description of a Project, that I was interested in and implemented in a couple of things I worked on back then. I did some digging, but the only references I can find on this blog are some passing mentions in the early 2000s, and I’ve lost my original foaf.rdf file but I might have to go hunting for that for posterity, at some stage.

I’m mentioning all of this because it reminds me that I’ve always been interested in the Semantic Web space, and also in the people aspects of the web, beyond just the words and the technology – Who is making What, and How it is all connected.

Humans today

Back to the ~present!

About 10 years ago – actually 12 years ago, according the last updated date in the original humans.txt file – there was the quiet proposal of an idea, for a humans.txt file, that could live in parallel to the robots.txt file on a web server.

The robots.txt file is intended for site owners to provide instructions to web crawlers – “robots”, or automated programs – as to how to behave in relation to the content of the site: this is the agreed-upon standard way in which the web works, and signals to search engines how to index websites, going all the way back to the early days of 1994-7, and later fully documented by Google and others.

The idea for the humans.txt file was simply that we should have a simple way to credit the people who made a website, in a super easy to create and publish format, regardless of the technology stack used to build the site or the URL formats and layout of the site. It was briefly documented and lightly promoted on humanstxt.org. I remember noticing it at the time, loving the idea, but then not really doing anything with it, and I admit that I didn’t end up using it myself.

However, Stefan is using this on his site (and wrote about it 11 years ago, because of course he’s ahead of me again 😀) and it made me think:

• This is still A Great Idea, and Right Now Could Be Its Time
  • We’ve seen deliberate misinterpretations / mis-statements (from big AI players) about the value of robots.txt in relation to AI crawlers/scrapers in the past 6-12 months. Let’s re-emphasise the human aspect here.
  • humanstxt.org could do with a bit of a refresh / re-upping and updating, maybe, but it’s on all of us to promote and adopt this idea.
  • the IndieWeb is thriving, and I’ve been seeing folks returning from XOXO over the past week enthusing about the greatness of the web.

REMEMBER THE JOY THE INTERNET CAN BRING! ❤

https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-what-it-felt-like-to-make-your-first-website

— Dan Hon #xoxofest (@danhon) 2024-08-24T17:53:01.066Z

• Why don’t I add this to my sites? OK then, I will.
• Hold on, is there a browser extension for this? Oh, there is (although with the rollout of the new Chrome updates / Manifest V3 and lack of maintenance, they may not work in the future)
• OK what about a WordPress plugin, for this here WordPress blog of mine? Oh, there is (although it has not been updated lately, and continues to refer to legacy stuff like some site called Twitter; it works, though)
• We really, really need to give credit where credit is due, in a world where things are increasingly being sucked up, mashed together by algorithms, and regurgitated in ways that diminish their creators for the enrichment of others.

What I’m saying, is this – Thank You, Stefan, and Sara, and Dan Hon[2] and everyone else from XOXO and everywhere all over the internet, for reminding me that the web is great, humans are incredible , and hey, why don’t we all give this humans.txt thing one more try? I’m on board with that.

1. In that post, I also mentioned that the Tiny Awards 2024 winners were due to be announced – and as I’m writing now, they have been: One Minute Park, and One Million Checkboxes.
2. A new edition of Dan’s excellent newsletter literally was published as I was typing this blog post. You need to subscribe to it.