Humans.txt, like robots.txt, but for humans.

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.

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".

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 .

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

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