John Cowan cowan at ccil.org
Wed Feb 24 14:26:54 GMT 2021
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On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 9:08 AM <nothien at uber.space> wrote:
Let me make my argument more specific: author and date and related
metadata isn't useful to a receiving /client/ because there's nothing it
can do with it.
That is true, provided you understand "client" as "client for human use"only. A search engine is a server with respect to its users, but a client(of a special kind) with respect to the servers it is indexing.
However, it does not mean that metadata is useless to the *user*. Forexample, a user who wishes to do something more with the document than justread it can look for "rights" metadata to see what is and isn't allowed.This can be a Creative Commons or FSF/OSI license name or tag, or justplain text. (On this basis, I now think that recommending clients to hidemetadata is wrong unless the client provides a way of displaying it. Ifyour client doesn't understand metadata, it will display it anyway, andthat's fine.)
hese can certainly be helpful for stored gemtext files
(although there are other places metadata can be stored, e.g. in a
database), as they provide this information to the /server/ to which it
is useful (particularly for searching and categorizing).
By keeping metadata in-band it is much easier to make sure it is not lostas documents are mirrored and otherwise passed around. My extensiveexample provides a link to formal RDF metadata for those who understand it.
John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.orgSAXParserFactory [is] a hideous, evil monstrosity of a class that shouldbe hung, shot, beheaded, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake,buried in unconsecrated ground, dug up, cremated, and the ashes tossedin the Tiber while the complete cast of Wicked sings "Ding dong, thewitch is dead." --Elliotte Rusty Harold on xml-dev-------------- next part --------------An HTML attachment was scrubbed...URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20210224/583d386d/attachment.htm>