Feed format for gemini (alternative to rss feed)
Ranf Dev
ranfdev at gmail.com
Mon Sep 7 18:55:30 BST 2020
> These are in response to James' original proposal for a new feed
format, but in your responses both of you seem to propose another
new one, in gemtext and CSV respectively.
Indeed in my previous email I made a poor choice of words.
I will try to better explain my proposal here.
RSS, (and atom, json...) feeds are easily parsable by machines and are
already supported by
feed readers, but they aren't readable by gemini clients. Also they are
> fairly verbose and Allow[s] for things like embedding images
Introducing a completely new feed format with its own new syntax would require
writing more code to parse it, so I don't agree with that decision.
Considering the above, and taking Spacewalk
(gemini://rawtext.club:1965/~sloum/spacewalk.gmi) as an example, I'm proposing
to use a format that doesn't require writing any new code, so that it
can be displayed by already
available gemini clients.
```
=> link1 date1 title1
Description1...
=> link2 date2 title2
Description2...
```
(ISO-8601 date).
Indeed, it's a new format and has its quirks, but we don't need to
change anything to
use it.
Advanced clients can implement special features by taking advantage
of this format: for example they can aggregate multiple feeds, or notify users
of new items.
Older clients can still fallback and show the feed as nice simple gemtext.
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