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[SPEC] Backwards-compatible metadata in Gemini

nothien at uber.space nothien at uber.space

Tue Feb 23 21:12:37 GMT 2021

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Oliver Simmons <oliversimmo at gmail.com> wrote:

Metadata is NOT for presentation.

By that, I mean things like the favicon and color proposals, which werealso bunched under the 'metadata' umbrella category/name.

Myself I've more been thinking of the how and not the why with this,
and I apologise for that. Most of the examples given here are pretty
pointless for clients, nobody has suggested any uses for metadata
other than to replace the favicon thing, author, and the "when" of the
document. The only major uses I can think of is for orbits
(webrings), and it would help search engines. It's pretty pointless.

I agree, it's not useful, but I wanted to cover a few of the cases youmentioned. I disagree with the favicon feature as a whole, so I'm notgoing to touch that. I don't know how webrings are organized on Gemini,but I'm not sure how the author or date would matter there. From myunderstanding, these things typically link to the whole gemini capsules,which should already provide author information, and I don't think dateinfo is relevant here. We already have the gmisub companion spec fordescribing gemlog posts and similar dated content. Search enginestypically date content based on when they first indexed it, so that'snot an issue either.

Read the spec, read the FAQ, read the companion documents, read the
mailing list, and /understand/ the spirit of Gemini.
I would hope everyone here has.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be the case.

All existing software would still work. This is only an addition.
About the freezing, I got the impression it was only the protocol that
was frozen.
...
On Tue, 23 Feb 2021 at 19:23, Julien Blanchard <julien at typed-hole.org> wrote:
We should always consider underpowered devices, screen readers,
people with a slow internet connection. I know TLS is already a
burden for some of these cases so let’s not add more data to
transfer.
I don't see how adding a few lines would cause much of an issue?

The issue is not that it would break pre-existing software, but that itwould make it less appealing to use, compared to new software which doesimplement the new additions. This applies to clients and servers andeverything in between. That's the 'rift' I was talking about in myoriginal mail.

~aravk | ~nothien