[SPEC] Backwards-compatible metadata in Gemini

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 03:08:32PM +0100,
 nothien at uber.space <nothien at uber.space> wrote 
 a message of 34 lines which said:

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

Me too.

> 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.

Like John Cowan explained, you have a very restricted view of what a
Gemini client is. A crawler, for instance, is a /client/.

But even with "clients for interactive human use" such as Amfora or
Lagrange, metadata could be useful, for instance to help to bookmark
resources, or to present them differently.

> I ... didn't think about this.

This is what happened to the Web with the WHATWG (which, in all
fairness, was a complicated issue but one of the main reported
problems was that the W3C was not listening).