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Lars Noodén lars.nooden at gmx.com
Tue Feb 23 09:15:56 GMT 2021
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On 2/23/21 10:05 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:[snip]
The good point is that it already exists so we don't reinvent
the wheel.[snip]
Greetings,
Some of this depends on what kind of metadata we are talking about.
I am reluctant to discuss extension. I would have to say that the only topic of potential interest to me [1] in that area would be aboutdocument metadata: Gemini is about transmission of information andmetadata is information. By document metadata I mean information/about/ the document content.
As for the questions of network budget, fingerprinting, pressure toinclude, and complexity[2], those can be addressed.
If the document metadata is in the body of the document, then there areno extra network requests. That addresses fingerprinting and mostlyaddresses network budget.
The metadata does not have to be marked up in a difficult manner to beboth machine readable and human readable. Borrowing from the linksyntax [3],
=:[<whitespace>]<TERM><whitespace><METADATA>
which could look like this in the body, but would be up to the client asto how it is dealt with. Left unprocessed, it would degrade gracefullyand be quite readable.
=: dc.title A Random Title=: dc.date 2021-02-23=: keywords cat; dog; bird
Again, by being included anywhere inside the body, there would be noextra network calls.
There should be no requirement as to what is in the metadata, whichterms are allowed, or what the terms mean. Any extension should sayonly how terms may be included and leave the rest up to the capsule andthe client software. Otherwise the details would lead to discussionswhich would last years [4] at best while also reinventing the wheel.
If a tipping point is ever reached regarding use then there might besome pressure for clients to support it. But if the trajectory followsthat of HTML metadata, its use will be inconsistent, niche, andsite-specific.
Anyway, the type(s) of metadata would be up to the capsule owner to pickand for them follow a schema or vocabulary or not.
All that said, there is usually more to gain by KISS than by extensionor creeping featurism.
/Lars
[1] I (a retired digital libraries specialist) got into setting up aGemini capsule only two weeks ago but used to run a gopher site bothback when it was relevant and in more recent years as an Onion service. As for the WWW, I did not get into running any Web sites until 1994,the second of which was briefly so visited by the end of that year thatit caused a local network outage.
[2] https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2021/005504.html
[3] Project Gemini : Speculative specification gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi
[4] See also The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. What started out as aconsensus of a common descriptive core, a simple, no-nonsense list of 15semantic metadata terms which could fit on a single web page,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core#Dublin_Core_Metadata_Element_Set
has morphed since the 1990s into this egregious monstrosity:
https://dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/ https://www.iso.org/standard/71339.html