authorship tag

[Thomas Karpiniec]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2020 at 05:31:27AM +0200, Petite Abeille wrote:
> The tag URI  is defined as follow:
> 
> "tag:" authorityName "," YYYY-MM-DD-date ":" specific [ "#" fragment ]
> 
> text/gemini document could sport one, to convey authorship.
> 
> One could turn a gemini url into a tag, e.g.:

I'm not clear what that would gain me as either an author or as a
reader?

This suggestion, along with anything else involving packing
"interesting" data inside URIs is very reminiscent of the semantic
web. The idea of the semantic web is that documents are optimised for
reading by _computers_, in ways that web documents currently are not.

Everything about the existing specification of text/gemini, along with
the discussions on this list worrying about how documents look for
those who simply "cat" the contents to screen, suggests a desire for a
document format that is optimised for _human_ consumption even in its
bare form. When meaningful information becomes sandwiched between
colons and URL-encoded, or worse base64-encoded, then that's at odds
with human readability. For all practical purposes computer assistance
is required to extract and interpret the information content, content
that could otherwise have been written in English.

Taken together your ideas seem like an interesting project, one that
could easily operate over the gemini transfer protocol, but such URIs
seem at odds with the dominant usage of text/gemini specifically.

Cheers,

Tom