gemini-fmt idea

[✈個展]

Hi all,

I just joined the list but have read some of the recent messages and
wondered if having a gemini-fmt tool like Go and Rust use to conform a
source document to a pre-existing spec might solve some of the issues
around Gemini documents meeting the spec and around properly configuring
the meta headers.

I feel like the people writing servers and clients are doing a huge service
to the community, so having this gemini-fmt tool would help ease the load
on them by ensuring that the Gemini documents that get uploaded to servers
for public consumption and are then served to clients are more or less
guaranteed to conform to the spec. This will save the people who write the
servers and clients from having to spend time handling all kinds of edge
cases. I'm including a preliminary outline of what I have in mind here
below. Comments are welcome.

Thanks,
J

--

# gemini-fmt idea

## Summary

A tool for Gemini authors that automatically conforms their Gemini texts to
the Gemini spec and also applies the author's preferences for meta headings
such as spoken language and robot indexing/proxying.

Should likely be written in Python 3, so that it can run just about
everywhere and be very lightweight.

Could also be hosted on a website, where a Gemini author could cut and
paste their text and indicate their meta preferences (see below) and
recieve a spec compliant Gemini text to paste back into their editor to
then save and upload to a server.

## On first run

gemini-fmt will ask the Gemini author to input their preferences for the
following:

### Language

- Enter the spoken language that your Gemini texts will usually be
published in

### Robots

- archiving - Should your Gemini texts be allowed to be archived long-term
on a third party website?

- proxy-gopher - Should your Gemini texts be allowed to be accessible over
gopher through Gemini to gopher translator services?

- proxy-html - Should your Gemini texts be allowed to be accessible through
Gemini to html translator services?

- research - Should your Gemini texts be allowed to be scanned by third
parties conducting research that will access your texts but not re-publish
the contents?

- search-engine - Should your Gemini texts be allowed to be scanned for use
and/or re-publishing in search engines?

## Other ideas

- Simple mode/expert mode - let a more technical user that might like to
otherwise configure their own settings just run a spec check that won't
automatically change their text but just warn of errors and point them to
relavent parts of the spec

- Override general settings - a Gemini author might want to give full
robots permissions to one text but no others, maybe there needs to be some
kind of index for robots that shows the file path for those?

- Something like the preformatted tag to indicate a second language within
a text already tagged as another language
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