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[SPEC] Backwards-compatible metadata in Gemini

avr at geminet.org avr at geminet.org

Fri Feb 26 12:09:37 GMT 2021

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On Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 11:44:38AM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 10:11:07PM +0200,
Lars Noodén <lars.nooden at gmx.com> wrote
a message of 27 lines which said:
The actual contents of the key-value pairs, the actual metadata itself,
would not be part of the spec, not even the keys.
May be not in "The Official Spec" but it certainly needs to be
somewhere, because otherwise people would tag the same information
differently ("last-modified", "last-change", "updated"), then
destroying its utility.

I'd say it is diminishing its utility, and even then mostly for third parties (like indexers).I also believe that useful metadata will roughly converge to a format within anatural language, like we're already seeing with meta-data like "Tags:". Sure, there are variations,but it's not unreasonable to say these are the responsibility of the third party to pick up on.

And if some writer really wants to be indexed by a particular engine, that engineshould put up a list of useful metadata for writers to use. Different engines cancopy each other, or be more distinctive in their meta-data requests.

Now e.g. chinese writers can freely use "标注:" for tags, meaning they probably don't care about being indexed/archived by non-chinese engines, but if an all-languagesengine still want to index the page, they can if they put in the work.[0]

So,

What are the benefits of a consolidated meta-data format for the two most important partieswithin Gemini: the writer and the reader?

Why are the third parties (indexers, archivers, etc) for whom meta-data could beimportant not working on this by themselves? They can write and publish rules, andthen try to get the writers onboard. And writers can decide for themselves if theextra trouble is worth the extra discoverability/better archiving, etc, forcing third parties to co-operate and to keep it simple.

In short, I don't understand the need for regulation when non-regulated convergenceseems a natural outcome that will fit the various use cases better through an evolutioanryprocess. Granted, waiting for convergence is a lot slower, but does faster adoption really matter with Gemini?

[0]"标注" is a dictionary translation for illustration purposes.