Again on feeds in Gemini format

[Luke Emmet]

On 19-Nov-2020 01:12, Emilis wrote:
> I wholeheartedly disagree with the opinion that Atom/RSS (or JSON 
> feeds) should be enough for everybody.
>
> The point is - some of us are not thinking about running feed 
> generators, parsers and aggregators on developer laptops, 
> workstations, modern servers we own, etc..
>
> We are thinking about running these programs on computers where we 
> have limited permissions, OpenWRT routers, experimental SBCs, old 
> netbooks and rooted phones that cannot be updated to any recent 
> distros, etc..
>
> In these situations even Python (widespread as it is) may not be 
> available, may be too resource-hungry or may not have the option to be 
> updated or extended with libraries.
>
> What we need is the ability to process feeds with a bare minimum of 
> tools (e.g. a POSIX shell, BusyBox, etc.). Parsing XML and JSON is not 
> feasible in these situations.
>
> Therefore we want a plain Gemini feed format. Seeing how easy it is to 
> generate and parse Gemini files with just plain shell script, makes us 
> want it badly. We also have hopes it would have more uses than just 
> gemlogging.

I see no harm in using Atom as a machine readable format, but from my 
point of view the main downside is expecting end users to author it, or 
have the skills to run some command line application to generate it. 
Probably fine for early adopters, but not so good for "normal" users.

Anyway a while back, I wrote a CGI script that emits Atom by parsing 
plain gmi feed listing. Details are here:

gemini://gemini.marmaladefoo.com/blog/2-Jul-2020_GMI_based_feed_generator.gmi

The parser is in Rebol, but parsing GMI is easy enough in most languages.

If we use raw GMI for feeds, one difficulty perhaps will be how the 
feeds can be discovered, particularly if they have to match some 
specification. But from an end user point of view, GMI is much nicer 
than XML for all the reasons we understand, so I think it is better way 
for authors to express their feed and can be used to generate the XML 
for automated feed clients that need it.

  - Luke