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Comment by 🚀 clseibold

Re: "Thoughts about Scorpion & Scroll"

In: u/halscode

I also want to clarify a few things about Scroll really quickly:

Pages do not have to be categorized, they can remain uncategorized, and they are uncategorized by default. Categorization is optional and allows crawlers to know where to place something in an index. Categorization of pages is a problem with search engines, which is why lots of formats offer categorization, be it tags in HTML or frontmatter in markdown documents, etc. UDC classification was the latest addition to Scroll, and could change in the future.
Scroll is more focused on documents, not pages in the traditional Gemini/HTML sense, so categorization does make sense with that explicit goal in mind. I believe Scroll, therefore, does not replace Gemini but acts in tandem with Gemini. Gemini is for apps, Scroll is for documents. That's why Scroll has more features in its markup language than is necessary for Gemini.
I believe automatic language selection is easy to implement and use, and that it does align with the simplicity goal, which I see as very different from minimalism. Simplicity also does not just take into account implementation, but users as well.
The data in the metadata fields are optional. The fields themselves are mandatory. This is a very important difference; you do not have to have metadata on any of your responses, but syntactically, the fields need to be there and be empty for that. It's purely a syntactical thing that prevents extensibility of the protocol in the future. Misfin(C) does a similar thing.
The abstract idea is not about them being automatically requested. They are also not metadata requests per se, they are abstract requests, and this is an important difference between Gopher+ and Scroll. In scroll, an abstract request only happens when the user wants an abstract of the page. If they just want the page, then they already get the metadata with that page. There is almost no reason for clients to automatically request abstracts of pages unless the user wants the abstract itself. Conversely, they are useful if the client *just* wants the abstract and not the page itself.
Minimalism and simplicity are very different, and I try to state this explicitly in my articles about Scroll. In a minimalist protocol, language selection and categorization would not align. But in a *simple* protocol, they do, because they are simple, not minimal. Minimal suggests less features, simple suggests features that are easy to implement and/or use.

Hopefully that clears some things up. Thanks for looking into Scroll! :)

🚀 clseibold

Oct 06 · 2 months ago

1 Later Comment

🚲 halscode [OP] · Oct 06 at 16:20:

@clseibold At the very least, you seem to understand how they work a lot better than I do! I do care a lot about accessibility, although it's usually not the first thing that comes to mind, and I'm also not nearly knowledgeable enough about it...

Original Post

🚲 halscode

Thoughts about Scorpion & Scroll — Scorpion First off I really don't like the use of a binary format. I see why you did it and I think it's too much. It requires a specialized tool to edit, so editing out of band via SSH, (S)FTP, or similar won't work. It's... well it is its own protocol, I guess. It has its own goals and if it achieves those, well that's great! Simplicity is obviously not one of them. The big ol' text file the spec is in is difficult for me to read. I think it's mostly...

💬 4 comments · 1 like · Oct 06 · 2 months ago