The Web Is for People

Web standards advocate Daniel Appelquist argues that human user needs must remain the top priority in web development, even as AI technologies advance. He emphasizes that AI systems are not people and should not supersede human needs, citing W3C design principles that put users first.

The Web is for People When it comes to building web sites, building applications, building new platforms and building the underlying standards that support them, I’m a big believer in driving everything by user need . I’ve often used the rubric “how does it benefit the person on the bus?” I suppose this is an updated version of the “ Man on the Clapham Omnibus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man on the Clapham omnibus “, a rhetorical device used to center people’s thinking on a hypothetical “ordinary person.” In the World Wide Web Consortium we have a long-standing design principle called the Priority of Constituencies https://www.w3.org/TR/design-principles/ priority-of-constituencies . This states that “user needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.” As also stated in IETF’s RFC-8890 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890 “The Internet is for End users” , users “means human users whose activities IETF standards support.” likewise, the priority of constituencies puts real people, human beings, at the top of the priority of constituencies to ensure we keep those people’s needs in mind whenever we are working to evolve the web platform. The priority of constituencies is literally principle number one in theW3C Technical Architecture Group’s Web Platform Design Principles https://www.w3.org/TR/design-principles/ . The W3C Advisory Board’s “ Vision for W3C https://www.w3.org/TR/w3c-vision/ ” also states: “The Web is for all humanity; The Web is designed for the good of all people.” And the Ethical Web Principles https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/ states “The web should also support human rights, dignity, and personal agency.” Meanwhile, the entire tech industry is in convulsions these days about AI, and many are asking the question “what is the future of the web in the new AI world?” Implicit in that question is a tired old refrain that I’ve commented on before https://www.torgo.com/blog/2025/05/dont-bet-against-the-wweb.html on this page – that somehow the emergence of a shiny new hotness will render the web obsolete. The new paradigm is always something less distributed, less open, and with more potential for centralised control. Language models, chatbots and agents may be looming large, but there is one thing they are definitely not: they’re not people. Despite the messianic predictions of a few, the current raft of AI technologies is not sentient. These systems are designed by people and often deployed by large corporations to achieve commercial aims – aims that are better served by cenralized control points. Therefore, when it comes to design of new technologies and systems, the needs of AI systems must always come after the needs of real human users. That is because the web is not a collection of technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The web is a philosophical choice to build a system that puts humans as its core constituency. The platform of technologies designed with that philosophy in mind may include AI-related systems. But if they are going to be part of the web, then they must be designed to put humans first.