#dev 2023-04-17
2023-04-17 UTC
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bkil prologic: https://indieweb.org/JSON_Feed#IndieWeb_Extension
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# prologic Hmm I thought we were talking about Twtxt not JSON feed 🤔
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# prologic Twitter--
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# bkil capjamesg: About syntax easier to parse than markdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)#Gemtext_format
# bkil [tantek]: What difficulty do you identify in reading & writing gemtext as a human? Note that I came up with a very similar shorthand and coded a generator for it even before markdown existed, so I wouldn't call it far-fetched. The markdown variants and their implementation complexity do worry me, however.
# bkil But also, the Web is about hyperlinked rich formatted documents, and you can't plausible solve that use case with plain text. I link to subsections of longer documents when referencing content for the benefit of my readers for example. I strive to attach quotes next to links to show previews so they don't have to click on potentially clickbait content.
# bkil I use preformatted block citations in place of photographs of code to reduce bandwidth load and to cater to the needs of the visually impaired (or just people consuming content on the go and working hands free). I think these are elementary and valuable formatting features without any complexity or ambiguity.
# bkil You can't link to headings within plain text document as they lack the means of creating headings.
# bkil You may autolink _from_ plain text documents. However, according to my experience, it is difficult to get autolinking to get right and most actually get it wrong all the time. And then iterate over it and produce regressions (i.e., your past links won't be clickable tomorrow). Just encountered such a regression in Nheko, but the author refused to fix it, maintaining that it was a "feature".
# bkil And then you just came up with markdown/gemtext!
# bkil An incompatible, NIH, in-house version that is.
# bkil Regardless of linking various RFC clauses that would prove _my_ preference for how autolinking should be implemented, in the end the developer chooses which RFCs they cherry pick to back up _their_ interpretation of how it should be done "properly". Compare this to how it can be done in markdown: <https://indieweb.org>
# bkil => https://indieweb.org gemtext
# bkil The way it is represented in gemtext needs getting used to, but at least makes for great consistency and zero corner cases (i.e., trivial to parse by both machines and humans).
# bkil Gemini, as an ecosystem and protocol has its drawbacks that limits its adoption rate. I actually have an alternative plan to achieve its goal with better adoption, but didn't pursue it lacking collaborators. And also: https://indieweb.org/antipatterns#mass_adoption
# bkil TL;DR My alternative would be to take a strict subset of HTTP & HTML that 100% corresponds to the gemini/gemtext subset and support dual-stack hosting of content over that. The generators would observe a strict (but somewhat forgiving) rendering of HTML to allow for gemini parsers to consume its output that were written on a single weekend.
# bkil The most complicated part would be replacing input with a fixed form, but that's also doable. I think it would have added to the retro romance of the movement to start mass producing web content by hobbists that could be consumed by web browsers from 1992!
# bkil Then the more worrisome issue with plain text publishing is how should the user agent know which parts are monospace and which parts not? Without that, you either need to give up all forms of charts and art (no-monospace), or make it very tiring to read (all-monospace).
# bkil I respect your opinion, but I recommend you read through what gemini is about to understand what the end goal is and how it can and can not be accomplished. I have shared above why I think that autolinking is not a very good way to go.
# 
Loqi space (also negative space or empty space) is typically used in IndieWeb contexts to refer to presentational blank space(s) on web pages, and the space between words and lines of text, including line-breaks, sometimes used to format note posts, like to indent lines, or with specific meaning like text lists without markup https://indieweb.org/space
# bkil I think I forgot to comment this earlier, but it is again relevant. I think many here are confusing the syntax typed in by publishers, what appears on the screen of viewers and how this all is serialized over the wire. As mentioned, ActivityPub (and its predecessors) serialize to HTML tags while publishers usually enter one of plain text, BBCode, Markdown, rst or HTML.
# bkil Similarly, nothing is keeping one from offering an editor widget that is autolinking, but it should offer a preview to the publisher to see how it will appear in the end, and it should be "set in stone", i.e., serialized in a stable format (be it gemtext, HTML or some CommonMark variant).
# bkil I don't consider it due diligence of authoring practice to serialize in txt and assume that the consumer will follow certain undocumented heuristics to present it.
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[tantek] There are different considerations to authoring vs interchange yes. I’m speaking in the context of author-centric plain text design, and I believe it is correct to save & edit what the author wrote in the first place, not some post processed result (because the post-processing can improve over time!)
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# [tantek] I took a look at the Wikipedia description of Gemtext format. Gemtext is not a plain text format. As Wikipedia says, it is a (yet another) line-oriented format, in this regard more like config files, or RFC822 format, vCard/iCalendar, robots.txt, .htaccess etc. It's not for user content authoring even though it is vaguely readable (just as config files and raw RFC822 are)
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# bkil I faced the same dilemma of "post-processing improvement" vs. consistency back in the days when I started blogging. I would like to refer to the following principle: https://indieweb.org/antipatterns#at_some_point In reality, I have seen orders of magnitudes of more cases of altered heuristics breaking old content than improving it. In the few cases where it did, it was about fixing past bugs, but that could have been avoiding by providing a preview (or was
# bkil caused by imports).
# bkil Could you provide a link to some cases? I honestly can't recall any case.
# bkil If the composer widget fails to auto-tag users or auto-link hashtags, shouldn't the publisher notice before pressing the save button?
# bkil After the system serializes it in any machine-readable way (even using yarn.social twtxt), there is no place for improved parsing for the examples you have disclosed.
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# bkil I'm not advocating it here, I just wanted to highlight that the lightest markup I know has built-in support for serializing links, user mentions and hashtag mentions in a deterministic way.
# bkil It's <url> @<url> #<url> by the way
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# bkil The one-way workflow of producing content from txt is an artifact from the 80s I think. We had rich editing widgets since the 90s that actually support an interactive editing flow where the machine holds the hand of the user, and then serializes the result (in a machine-readable way) for it to be presented to the user for later editing in a lossless manner. Anything else is https://indieweb.org/architecture_astronomy
# [tantek] note that nearly every chat client, like Slack, IRC, Matrix, our own chat archives does auto-linking - so don't bother arguing that. that argument is over: https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2023-04-17#t1681744801264900
# bkil Did you consider documenting your text-only publishing preferences? I fail to find it on your user page https://indieweb.org/Tantek
# [tantek] this is what's implemented so far: https://indieweb.org/Falcon#Note
# [tantek] additional improvements I'm implementing are documented here: https://tantek.com/w/Markdown#Modestsolutionssummary (I really need to create a new page for my redesign of Markdown)
# bkil You mean this? https://indieweb.org/why#More_robust
# [tantek] no this: https://indieweb.org/own_your_links
# [tantek] though good find — that's a good spot to put a link to /own_your_links
# bkil Yes, I also read this one in the past as well and indeed that's what I was looking for. I wish the wiki had a better search engine.
# bkil Is it an antipattern to stuff these wiki pages with keywords (in a dedicated section) to improve search results?
# [tantek] and thanks to your input I added this section also, to make my authoring practices more discoverable: https://indieweb.org/Tantek#authoring_practices
# bkil [tantek]++
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[KevinMarks] This was interesting https://animaomnium.github.io/keep-stuff-linkable/
# [tantek] I'm starting to see if I can shift my mindset about publishing from binary (unpublished / published, which is a bit of a strawman, since no one really does that, i.e. there's a timeline of incremental keystrokes even within "unpublished") to a blurry timeline spectrum from offline notes, online synced drafts, publicly viewable at a permalink, posts showing up on a home page, posts showing up in side-files, posts being federated,
# bkil I always had a cognitive dissonance relating to whether to publish a given article or snippet on a personal wiki-like space at a generalized short URL that can be extended or rewritten from scratch later or in a blog-like journal under a fixed temporal URL that could still afford typo fixes or adding a sentence or link or two.
# Loqi 🌱🪴 A digital garden is a particular practice of creating & growing an online and public IndieWeb presence that focuses more on topics & relationships than a timeline like blogs, has content of different levels of development, is imperfect and often a playground for experimentation, learning, revising, iteration, and growth for diverse content, perhaps interlinked with other digital gardens https://indieweb.org/digital_garden
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[aciccarello] Like for SEO reasons?
# [KevinMarks] I'm not sure if that's an atom thing directly or a cms feature
# [KevinMarks] APP had a draft property https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5023#section-13.1.1
# [KevinMarks] You could do a deferred websub
# [KevinMarks] Talking of websub, this made me smile/wince https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2023Apr/0044.html
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# [snarfed] yeah much of that thread interpreted "native internet protocol for social media" as "let's look yet again at evolving RSS/Atom," and is now in WebSub etc, and totally missed the point that social media is about rich interactions, replies likes reposts reactions etc, and optimizing delivery of original posts is both semi-unnecessary and totally misses all of the interaction semantics
# Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "RSS nostalgia" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "RSS nostalgia is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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[schmarty] some good stuff in the chat logs: https://chat.indieweb.org/2022-12-07#t1670448853795900
# [schmarty] (and more, searching "rss nostalgia")
# [schmarty] oop, found where the thread continued in -dev: https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2022-12-07#t1670449057815100
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# bkil [tantek] [capjamesg] : "Just install" would make more sense. Maybe "install" itself? But also, SEO-bait isn't actually proper terminology - I just made it up. Adding "SEO" would be useful.
# bkil It would actually be an interesting side project to go through the each channel log and try to discover (or at least recommend) possible jargon based on what occurs in #dev more than anywhere according to statistically significance.
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# bkil I haven't read through enough conversations here to tell for sure, but I have a feeling that most any TLA should be on that list. And SEO is not for everybody, especially if it is done right at an advanced level. To meet the minimal desirable level, normal creators should not need to dig into it at all if they are using the right frameworks. And optimizing reach in a massive way is also an antipattern https://indieweb.org/reach#Do_It_For_the_Exposure
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# bkil I wanted to ask you about your position on scroll to text fragments, but I see this comment https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194#user-content-issuecomment-568581041
# bkil Funny how in the fragment article, the example scroll to text link is broken today, because it is citing too much text and the original linked to page has reworded this sentence.
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capjamesg I recently learned what TOML stands for: https://toml.io/en/
# bkil [tantek]: As I'm doing quotation and cited replies all the time, it is crucial to standardize on a single URL format. This wiki page recommends that I don't use a syntax supported by browsers other than Firefox and that I should use one that was proposed way earlier. Is this recommendation still up to day? https://indieweb.org/quotation
# bkil By syntax, I meant the one suggested by https://indieweb.org/fragmention
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# IWDiscordRelay <capjamesg#4492> What does granary mean [snarfed]?
# IWDiscordRelay <capjamesg#4492> I would like JAML now.
# IWDiscordRelay <capjamesg#4492> What it should do? I don’t know.
# IWDiscordRelay <capjamesg#4492> JAML. James’ Amazing Macchiato Language.
# IWDiscordRelay <capjamesg#4492> A formal description for coffee recipes.
# IWDiscordRelay <capjamesg#4492> I’m not sure it will catch on though 🙃
# IWDiscordRelay <capjamesg#4492> I see.
# IWDiscordRelay <capjamesg#4492> TIL!
# [snarfed] hey [KevinMarks] you added really slick HTML progress bars to huffduff-video a long time ago, any chance you'd be interested in doing something like that for rendering HTML polls in granary? https://github.com/snarfed/granary/issues/174#issuecomment-1512227388