Link: Humans TXT

by James on 22nd November, 2011 in General chit-chat

Humans.txt is an interesting idea – it’s (another) way for websites to create an association between the people (developers, authors, marketers, and so on) that are behind the creation of the website and the website itself, without actually including that information in the content of said website. It’s not exactly a web development standard, but it’s a neat idea; and it’s the kind of information that’s “there if you’re looking for it” but remains otherwise hidden from view – as it should be.

The format itself is very simple – it’s a plain-text file, called ‘humans.txt’, and it’s placed at the root of the website. In to that file you place whatever content you want, and whatever content is appropriate. A little more elegant than placing that content in the comments of your HTML, as has been done in the past.

For us Geeks, there’s a neat little plugin available for Google Chrome, which simplifies the discovery and viewing of these humans.txt files, when they exist on any website you visit.
The humans.txt plugin for Chrome is available from this link.

About James

James is a Senior New Media Developer at MMT Digital, and has BA(Hons) in Design for Interactive Media from the University of Gloucestershire. He loves designing and producing all sorts of website and Flash-related things, as well as prattling on about technologies.Day-to-day he works with Flash, Dreamweaver, Director, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and in his spare time he mucks about in Flex and Wordpress.Follow James on Twitter.