3.19 Use Plaintext Formats When Appropriate

Several small assets can be included within a website, conferring a range of benefits upon the website or application that utilizes them. They each have a low carbon footprint, so while they do create emissions, it’s worth including them for the benefits they provide.

Criteria

Beneficial File Formats: Include standards such as ads.txt, carbon.txt, humans.txt, security.txt and robots.txt.

Impact

Low

Effort

Low

Benefits

Environmental:
Plaintext requires no rendering. If visitors (or search engines) know about these useful files (like carbon.txt) they can load quicker and with less CPU / GPU impact than any HTML website.
Transparency:
The humans file provides credit to people involved in a site’s creation, and security offers critical points of contact if an issue is discovered. Both are valuable additions to a project.
Performance:
Plaintext files contain no links, no markup, and have no imprint. Putting credits (for example) in such a file will reduce data transfer and have a lower rendering footprint.
Economic:
The ads.txt file is part of a scheme to reduce advertising fraud, it could be useful.

GRI

materials: Medium
energy: Low
water: Medium
emissions: Low

Example

Code:

/* TEAM */
Your title: Your name.
Site: email, link to a contact form, etc.
Twitter: your Twitter username.
Location: City, Country.

/* THANKS */
Name: name or url

/* website */
Last update: YYYY/MM/DD
Standards: HTML5, CSS3,..
Components: Modernizr, jQuery, etc.
Software: Software used for the development

Humans.txt Quick start.

Resources

View the Guideline