[SPEC] Backwards-compatible metadata in Gemini

[nothien at uber.space]

Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> wrote:
> Using structured metadata allows you to search into documents those
> written, by John Guy (or Alice Gal). grep or other tools for
> unstructured searches don't help here since they cannot tell the
> difference between a page written by Alice Gal and a page discussing
> the life of Alice Gal.
> 
> Other examples of useful metadata: date of publication so you can
> find, for instance, the most recent, or exclude those that are too old
> / too young, licence, so you can find "only documents under a free
> licence", etc.

I'm sorry, I wasn't considering the case of gemtext as a storage format,
only of it as a communication format.

Let me make my argument more specific: author and date and related
metadata isn't useful to a receiving /client/ because there's nothing it
can do with it.  These can certainly be helpful for stored gemtext files
(although there are other places metadata can be stored, e.g. in a
database), as they provide this information to the /server/ to which it
is useful (particularly for searching and categorizing).

> Otherwise, what will happen? Since the Internet is permissionless,
> people will do it anyway. And probably in a worse way. If "we" (we
> being "the Wise Gemini People" or "Gemini Experts" or something like
> that) reject everything (or even if we are PERCEIVED as rejecting
> everything), people will do it elsewhere and may be do it badly. We
> cannot (and don't want to) prevent people from doing Gemini stuff
> outside of the "Gemini Official Channels" but we can at least act in
> good faith, and propose them a serious and documented way to have
> proposals examined (and may be rejected, but not dismissed without a
> serious examination).

I ... didn't think about this.