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Stephane Bortzmeyer stephane at sources.org
Wed Feb 24 12:09:49 GMT 2021
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On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 08:08:48PM +0100, nothien at uber.space <nothien at uber.space> wrote a message of 72 lines which said:
They're not necessary.
Nothing is necessary (except eating and breathing) but metadata areuseful.
What's the /point/ of standardizing a format for providing metadata
about a document? Seriously, I don't understand.
This argument surprised me. All the people who professionally managedocuments use metadata. I didn't think it was necessary to explaintheir uses. So, let's try;
What's the benefit of letting a client know who the author is? If
you, an author, want users to know that you wrote something, just
write "I wrote this".
Using structured metadata allows you to search into documents thosewritten, by John Guy (or Alice Gal). grep or other tools forunstructured searches don't help here since they cannot tell thedifference between a page written by Alice Gal and a page discussingthe life of Alice Gal.
Other examples of useful metadata: date of publication so you canfind, for instance, the most recent, or exclude those that are too old/ too young, licence, so you can find "only documents under a freelicence", etc.
Basically, it is not because YOU don't use them and don't see thepoint of them that nobody does.
just write in full sentences ('this was written on the 23rd of
February').
This is not parsable, so useless for programs.
The problem with 'just' posting ideas and suggestions and proposals like
these is that they waste everyone's time (including yours).
I strongly disagree. What's the point of this mailing list if not todiscuss ideas when some of them (may be most of them) will turn out tobe wrong? We can think of better tools for discussion, of course(separate mailing lists, issue trackers, whatever), but we need aplace to receive and discuss ideas.
Otherwise, what will happen? Since the Internet is permissionless,people will do it anyway. And probably in a worse way. If "we" (webeing "the Wise Gemini People" or "Gemini Experts" or something likethat) reject everything (or even if we are PERCEIVED as rejectingeverything), people will do it elsewhere and may be do it badly. Wecannot (and don't want to) prevent people from doing Gemini stuffoutside of the "Gemini Official Channels" but we can at least act ingood faith, and propose them a serious and documented way to haveproposals examined (and may be rejected, but not dismissed without aserious examination).
We (and I'm speaking for a lot of people here) are tired of dealing
with new ideas from eager new Geminiauts
Then, the solution is for these people to stop subscribing to the[spec] tag (or move to a separate mailing list, my personal opinion isthat we need several lists).
And new Geminauts are a good thing, this is the goal we try to reach.
Read the spec, read the FAQ, read the companion documents, read the
mailing list, and /understand/ the spirit of Gemini.
This is really patronizing. Most people who sent proposals on themailing list clearly know about Gemini and studied the matterseriously. Of course, there are some guys sending stupid wild ideasbut they are a very small (and unavoidable) minority.
Your contempt is the kind of attitude which risk to turn away people,either completely away from Gemini, or towards a de-facto fork.