💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › replies › 785 captured on 2021-12-05 at 23:47:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Since I’m sub-tweeting the mailing list anyway 😛 … Now they’re talking about metadata.
There is a consensus (among the loud voices) that metadata should never affect presentation. It’s really, really important to these people that Gemini remain only “pure” text. (Well, except for headings, lists, quotes, code samples, and ASCII art). But, no use arguing.
The funnier part is the discussion over metadata “tagging”. Which they shouldn’t call tagging because, let’s admit that word already has incompatible meanings this century?
So now a bunch of amateurs are trying to devise metadata standards and ignoring e.g. RFC2413. I dare not bring that up, though, because that’s a Web standard and it grew into the ridiculously heavy Dublin Core world of RDF and whatnot. At least some of the GML (Gemini Mailing List) cult appears convinced that they can avert the extended-beyond-control fate of the Web by simple avoiding any Web standards.
What they don’t see is that this happened to Dublin Core was too many people on mailing lists naval-gazing about imagined use cases, as they do now.
They do see an important truth: the extensibility of HTML is part of what gave rise to browser monoculture, with Mosaic and <IMG> eventually becoming <SCRIPT> and XMLHttpRequest. The problem is they think they can avoid this by saying “no” on a mailing list.
I’m hopeful, though! I think Gemini will actually succeed (for a meaningful time), because the Web already exists.