SPOOFED: Cognitive aspects of navigation in gemini space

[James Tomasino]

On 5/18/20 1:10 PM, jan6 at tilde.ninja wrote:
> you could have a little header in your source files, just the first line, and have server ignore the first line
> (it could be just language, or the entire mimetype, maybe)
> 
> etc etc, there are so many approaches to this ;P

There's a few decent ideas floating around already, I'll admit. I hope
one of them resonates with people. I'm wary of ones that involve adding
things to a gemini file, though, especially if they're not spec. If one
server decides to implement a language header by adding content to the
top of a .gmi, then moving content to another server type has burden
added. Little things like that add up and you end up with the different
"flavors" like markdown.

This is doubly true for what plugd was saying about gopher maps not
looking like the files that they are authored in for many gopher
servers. I would hope we can avoid this problem from the start. The .gmi
spec is simple and flexible. I'd hate to see us get into a situation
where we are creating new languages to generate it for transport so
early in the life of gemini.

I like your idea of a metadata file. I doubly-like it because then it's
an individual problem servers can handle on their own without us needing
to address anything more in the specs.