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[SPEC] Backwards-compatible metadata in Gemini

Baschdel baschdel at disroot.org

Tue Feb 23 17:37:19 GMT 2021

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I put some example metadata below my last E-Mail but after catching up with the rest of the discussion since writing it, and thinking a bit about it, I've come to the conclusion that I should add a littlebit of explanation.

First and foremost: I consider this st its current stage a (thought) experiment and MAYBE a future convention for gemtext.

Something I really shouldn't have to write, but to clarify:With great power comes great responsibility!Adding metadata adds great power and whoever is implementing a metadata based feature should ask themselves if what they are doing is the right thing to encourage (this applies to all things you are implementing).

^^^
version: 1
date-written: 21-02-23 11:09 +0100I added that one first and of course I messed it up.It should be:date written: 2021-02-23 11:09 +0100I choose this format because it's easy to parse for humans and computer alike for dates. The key consists of two keywords: date and written a client that cares about metadata but wants to keep it simple can simply search for the first thing starting with date. (Maybe just having date is enough)
author: Baschdel
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mailto:baschdel at disroot.org author contact E-MailI'm using link lines for uris here because then they will still work if the client ignores the metadata, the contact keyword tells the client that this link is contact information.the E-Mail is just a label for humans (I don't know if adding the label without any special delimiter is a good thing or not, it will definitely make it less easy to extend this)
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mailto:gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu?subject=… reply contactSame as above without a label for humans, a client could show a reply button at the bottom of the page
style: E-Mail messageCan of Worms! nasty ones!Thinking about it, it would be a good thing to add styling hints (for example that this is a fee page or search results page) but this would encourage writing gemtext, that is overloading linetypes left and right because some people don't realize, that styling and meaning are two different things.
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https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2021/005420.html answerto
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https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2021/005522.html mirrorTwo tagged links, one linking to the message this one is an answer to another one linking to a mirror of this page (following this system an alternative link to an answer would be tagged with "answerto mirror")

To prevent content authors and/or server from going wild I'd suggest, that clients always show the metadata section like it would render the page above.

One thing I don't really like with this one is, that we use English keywords here and that for human readable text that is intended to be attached to a file, that could be in any language and is not very accessible to non-English speakers.

A possible solution to that could be in unicode and (you guessed it, didn't you?) emoji (yay!), at least those little pictures are standardized and independent of the language(s) you speak. (Just make sure the emoji makes sense for what it is used)

Greetings- Baschdel (I should really spin up my own gemlog)