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Oliver Simmons oliversimmo at gmail.com
Wed Feb 24 18:18:23 GMT 2021
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On Wed, 24 Feb 2021 at 16:25, PJ vM <pjvm742 at disroot.org> wrote:
It is maybe important to note that much Gemini content is written with
just a text editor, by people who might not want to neatly structure
their metadata according to the convention. I'm not sure it would be a
good thing for search engines to rely much on metadata - the term
"search engine optimisation" comes to mind.
SEO would potentially be worse without metadata, as is obviouswhenever you use the web.The first search results are often articles full of "fluff", cookingrecipes will for some reason have a backstory, this isn't themetadata, this is the document itself being full of junk.The opposite is true though, people could use metadata to theiradvantage, but with it being structured it's easier to filter the junkout, and it also makes adding junk a bit harder.I've never done SEO myself - so I may be entirely wrong - but this isjust my perspective on it.
The user can also look for a line that says "This work is licensed
under...". Metadata need not be structured for human users to understand it.
Someone searching for freely-licenced (etc) documents is going to havea hard time in that case, they would have to go through every documentmanually to find the license.Having it always at the end would be faster for people manuallyreading, and would mean search engines/similar could just be asked tofilter out licenses they don't want (or do want).
Anyway, I think there are uses for in-file metadata, particularly for
searching a large collection of documents. And sure, it could be useful
to adopt a convention (either the "-:" line thing or the key-value pairs
at the end of the file thing, or something else entirely) just so that
people would have one way to do this that is commonly understood, and so
that broadly usable tools could be written for using metadata. However,
I don't think it is useful in most of Geminispace, and it should not be
used in places where there isn't a need for it. I definitely think we
should avoid it becoming an expectation for people who write stuff, or
for Gemini clients.
Agree - It certainly shouldn't be used *everywhere*, at least not to alarge extent.I'm going to say a typical page would have around MAXIMUM ~3/4 lines,but Bill Gates also said 640K would be enough so who knows.
I also think we should choose a convention that is simple and not easily
extensible. The key-value pairs at the end of the file thing seems a bit
better on non-extensibility - it's definitely better on readability.
:)
Also, I've thought of a great use - email archives.Data could be added upon archival by whatever's archiving it (not bythe people writing emails - that would be stupid).Searching them would be made easier if you could just tell yoursearcher to filter to this:
^^^emailfrom: oliversimmo at gmail.comfrom-name: Oliver Simmonsreply-to: blah blahsubject: [SPEC] Backwards-compatible metadata in Gemini (this wouldprobably make more sense as the page h1, but whatever)