I like the idea of humans.txt as a way to signal that the web is built by humans for humans, and that authors, designers, coders etc should get credit for published work even if they don’t get a byline or any “official” credit on the site.

This site isn’t particularly complex (yet..), and I did all the authoring myself, but at the same time I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. Just imagine the countless hours that countless people put in to build all the software, standards, VScode extensions, templates, and various behind-the-scenes stuff that I’m not even realizing that I’m using. Of course I can’t give credit to everyone of them here, but the idea of humans.txt at least acknowledges that everything is built by humans. Imagine if we had a database of every piece of code/text ever published, every image, every sound, every design, etc. And I could use that database to trace everything back through all the iterations to an original author with the original idea? Like in music, the autotune sound of 90% of today’s rap songs can be traced back to Cher’s “Believe”, where the producer Mark Taylor “discovered” the sound by accident. And the database could interpret human language so I could ask it “Who came up with that weird voice effect used in all the rap songs” and it would point me to Mark Taylor. I guess that’s what Google sort of does already, but anyway, I should stop rambling here..

tl;dr

I follow the instructions on humanstxt.org and put some text in my own human.txt file, and added <link rel="author" href="/humans.txt" /> to my head.html.