💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 001327.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:57:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

<-- back to the mailing list

Lightweight Unicode Author Client Hinting - LUACH proposal

Luke Emmet luke.emmet at gmail.com

Thu Jun 4 12:22:21 BST 2020

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Hello everyone

I've been thinking about various discussions we've been having on the list related to how to use and build on/augment the geminisphere in a way that is true to the gemini vision, such as how do we:

- indicate and find comments between pages in a lightweight gemini-way- provide ways to optionally "include" images or text- signal where is your a site home page- provide a common navigation menu- indicate the location of your site logo

I've started a proposal to define a way for an author to signal these elements in a lightweight, text based and optional way, dubbed "Lightweight Unicode Author Client Hinting for Gemini - LUACH"

The idea is to codify a minimal set of conventions we can use to build further structure on top of the gemini space to support additional purposes.

I must emphasis the intention is for this to be *wholly optional* and I dont think it needs to become part of the canonical standard, as it is just a set of optional text conventions. Maybe if successful it could be a set of common conventions that are becoming adopted, and a good practice. It codifies things that are emerging as common conventions we see in geminispace, or more widely. For example "standard" names for home page or ways of communicating comments textually

=

gemini://myowndomain/home.gmi Home=
gemini://xyzdomain/cookery/egg-recipies.gmi Responds to XYZ thoughts on how to cook eggs

Or as we already see the use of unicode glyphs to indicate comments such as the speech bubble 💬 emoji or house 🏠 for home.

This is intended to be very lightweight and helpful for readers using simple command line clients as much as it might be for richer clients who may provide additional UI. There isnt any overhead for authors apart from providing these optional hints in their link text, which can help everyone.

The "responds to" and "has comments" can be used by search crawlers to build a meta layer of who is commenting on whom within gemini space

I've put it in Github here:

https://github.com/LukeEmmet/GeminiLUACH

Comments and further thoughts welcome

Best wishes

- Luke