The Web Is for People

The Web is for People – Dan's Blog

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The Web is for People

Daniel Appelquist

Posted on June 20, 2026

Posted in W3C, Web

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A London bus headed for Clapham Junction. Image credit: Lisa Heeke (Unsplash)

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", 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. 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 ("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. The W3C Advisory Board’s "Vision for W3C" also states: "The Web is for all humanity; The Web is designed for the good of all people." And the 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 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.

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Who is Daniel Appelquist?

I'm an immigrant and US/UK dual national who has been living in London since 1999. I'm an advocate for emerging web technologies, the open web, open source and open data. I'm working at Samsung's Open Source Group. I am a co-chair of the W3C Advisory Board (and previously co-chair of the W3C Technical Architecture Group), a co-chair of OpenSSF's Global Cybersecurity Policy Working Group, and a co-founder and governing committee member of Open Web Docs. I guess you could say I like “open” stuff.

If you're curious where the nickname Torgo came from, I appropriated it from a character in the the movie Manos: the Hands of Fate via Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Unless otherwise noted, this blog consists of my own personal views and is not endorsed by my employer or any other party or nation state.

If you are so inclined, you may find my public key on Keybase.io.

For more info on my professional life, see my Linkedin profile.

I am active in the #Fediverse at @torgo@mastodon.social:

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This work by Daniel Appelquist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Web Is for People

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