Lightweight Unicode Author Client Hinting - LUACH proposal

[Luke Emmet]

Hello everyone

I've been thinking about various discussions we've been having on the 
list related to how to use and build on/augment the geminisphere in a 
way that is true to the gemini vision, such as how do we:

- indicate and find comments between pages in a lightweight gemini-way
- provide ways to optionally "include" images or text
- signal where is your a site home page
- provide a common navigation menu
- indicate the location of your site logo

I've started a proposal to define a way for an author to signal these 
elements in a lightweight, text based and optional way, dubbed 
"Lightweight Unicode Author Client Hinting for Gemini - LUACH"

The idea is to codify a minimal set of conventions we can use to build 
further structure on top of the gemini space to support additional 
purposes.

I must emphasis the intention is for this to be *wholly optional* and I 
dont think it needs to become part of the canonical standard, as it is 
just a set of optional text conventions. Maybe if successful it could be 
a set of common conventions that are becoming adopted, and a good 
practice. It codifies things that are emerging as common conventions we 
see in geminispace, or more widely. For example "standard" names for 
home page or ways of communicating comments textually

=> gemini://myowndomain/home.gmi Home
=> gemini://xyzdomain/cookery/egg-recipies.gmi Responds to XYZ thoughts 
on how to cook eggs

Or as we already see the use of unicode glyphs to indicate comments such 
as the speech bubble 💬 emoji or house 🏠 for home.

This is intended to be very lightweight and helpful for readers using 
simple command line clients as much as it might be for richer clients 
who may provide additional UI. There isnt any overhead for authors apart 
from providing these optional hints in their link text, which can help 
everyone.

The "responds to" and "has comments" can be used by search crawlers to 
build a meta layer of who is commenting on whom within gemini space

I've put it in Github here:

https://github.com/LukeEmmet/GeminiLUACH

Comments and further thoughts welcome

Best wishes

- Luke