John Cowan cowan at ccil.org
Thu Feb 25 01:20:14 GMT 2021
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On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 4:59 AM Nathan Galt <mailinglists at ngalt.com> wrote:
Once some capsules start using metadata that’s only usable in some
clients, those capsules will have an implicit Best Viewed In Gemini Client
X label stuck to them. The Best Viewed In Browser X era of the Web is _not_
something I want replicated in Gemini.
We are already there.
For example, a capsule that contains text/plain files can be rendered insome clients but not all, or at least a conformant Gemini client can bewritten that can't cope with text/plain. The same applies to all othermedia types, because media types are extensible.
What is more, a capsule that links to Gopher menus or documents is mosteasily read using a client that supports either Gopher protocol natively oran outboard Gopher proxy. That's because of the extensibility of theInternet protocol suite.
The issue that arose with "works best in browser X" was presentational:some web pages looked good (for particular values of "good") in browser Xbut not so good in browser Y. That changed when browsers started toinclude a JavaScript engine, and it became also a matter of what pageswould even *work* in browser Y at all. But we are far from that precipicenow.
Fortunately, we have general agreement that there will be no *standardized*presentational markup in text/gemini. But it's still possible to write aclient that interprets a line beginning with "***" by rendering it initalics, and we can't stop that, nor can we stop it from spreading to otherclients, or authors starting to use it. That's because of theextensibility of the interpretation of plain-ish text.
The only way to avoid all this is a WHATWG-ish standard in which everythinga client can do is spelled out in excruciating detail, and whatever is notpermitted is forbidden. I think it is 100% unlikely that we will ever gothere.
Because I’m already strongly in favor of making it easy to make a good
Gemini client, I’m against proposals that could, down the line, increase
the amount of work that it’d take to make a good, full-featured Gemini
client. Arbitrary-metadata proposals are a fully general can of worms that,
say, double-digit status codes aren’t.
You can abuse metadata, but as I have demonstrated above, you can alsoabuse existing content, and one is no worse than the other. A metadata FAQwould say that clients can convert the values of metadata lines frommachine-readable to human-readable (from "Jefferson, Thomas" to "ThomasJefferson", for example, or even from "Waldo, Edward Hamilton" to "TheodoreSturgeon") but a metadata line should otherwise be treated like a text line.
John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.orgThe present impossibility of giving a scientific explanation is no proofthat there is no scientific explanation. The unexplained is not to beidentified with the unexplainable, and the strange and extraordinarynature of a fact is not a justification for attributing it to powersabove nature. --The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "telepathy" (1913)-------------- next part --------------An HTML attachment was scrubbed...URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20210224/54e05a0a/attachment.htm>