[SPEC] Backwards-compatible metadata in Gemini

[aaronleonard]

Hi all,

First time posting on this mail list or any mail list for that matter.
Let me know if I'm responding on it incorrectly. Just sharing my
thoughts on metadata. I personally don't think metadata should be
included in the same way that HTML uses metadata with <meta> tags.

Metadata is only useful if something about the file format demands it
be meta. For audio or video formats I can see this being the case as
aside from file name(which would be a very messy and not very universal
way to include it) there's not much a person can do. Gemtext doesn't
suffer this issue, a person can write the date written, published and
the author(s if there's more than one) in a way that fits best with the
document. If this data is omitted, then usually the author chose to omit
it as that data isn't relevant to the content displayed on the page. On
this point, a lot of the metadata included in websites, is very much a
victim of the same thing, it should be data included directly with the
content if it's relevant... and it seems a lot of the metadatas that are
included are completely irrelevant to the content. Convince me otherwise

Only benefit seems to be to bots/softwares involving gemtext such as
clients, search engines or scrapers- and it would require creating a
standard for the metadata that someone would have to maintain, and
outreach to get people to adopt the standard in writing gemtexts and in
writing their clients- plus it encroaches a little bit on how long a
person should spend to write a gemini client of their own. That's a lot
of stuff just to have metadata that should be included as data in the
document.

For the reasons above, I'm relatively indifferent to metadata but think
it's a fair lot of time to pursue(at least to the same degree as <meta>
tags have gone). Personally, if a person was to create and adopt a
standard, I'd use it if it's useful AND human-readable.

Cheers mates,
- Aaron