(proposal) on metadata in documents

[cbabcock at asciiking.com]

November 16, 2020 4:17 AM, smlckz at tilde.pink wrote:

> I am not against ISO 8601 format and don't want to dive into l10n mess. I wonder if we need a
> seperator between content and metadata or not, or
> it'd be better to put the whole metadata into a preformatted text block
> with alt-text of `metadata`, or using some prefix for each line of metadata
> field. What do you think?
> 
> ~smlckz

The least friction way to implement metadata would be to present it a preformatted yaml:

``` yaml
title:  'This is the title: it contains a colon'
author:
- Author One
- Author Two
keywords: [nothing, nothingness]
abstract: |
  This is the abstract.

  It consists of two paragraphs.
```

A variation that I believe would have utility the most utility in clients would be a new syntactic feature called metadata implemented similar to preformatted blocks, like:

--- yaml
title:  'This is the title: it contains a colon'
author:
- Author One
- Author Two
keywords: [nothing, nothingness]
abstract: |
  This is the abstract.

  It consists of two paragraphs.
---

Not evangelizing yaml in this context, though it's not a bad fit. Just taking my example from Pandoc documentation - https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#metadata-blocks 

Obviously document writers *can* include metadata in any document they write, so the question would be whether the value added by encouraging a uniform presentation is worth defining a metadata line type in the specification. I think doing so enables interesting options for client code, and that creating a line type as opposed to dictating page placement is more idiomatically gemini text

Chris