# 7 5th mo. 2021 - Simple Gemini Syndication?

One thing I remember about the early "Web 2.0" conversations was a wild sense of possibility and enthusiasm about the Web as a medium for dynamic and meaningful communication. In those days, the emerging standards weren't dictated by Silicon Valley power brokers, and even hobbyists could weigh in meaningfully.

I'm nowhere near the visionary nor the cognitive workhorse of those people, so this idea is probably destined for the Trash file. But I'll post it anyway, just in case it sparks any useful conversation at all.

Today I thought of a format for simple syndication files following the Gemini Protocol. Here's how it could work:

```
# Capsule Gaptooth
description: Just another gemlog
=> gemini://sdf.org/gaptooth/ home
=> mailto:gaptooth@sdf.org maintainer

=> gemini://sdf.org/gaptooth/drafts/2021-05-07.gmi 2021-05-07T00:00 Simple Gemini Syndication?
=> gemini://sdf.org/gaptooth/drafts/2021-05-04.gmi 2021-05-04T00:00 Mind the Light
=> gemini://sdf.org/gaptooth/drafts/2021-05-02.gmi 2021-05-02T19:00 Drafts: Lowering the Stakes for Writing
```

That is, the feed title should be the first line of the file, marked up as a 1st-level Gemini heading:
```
# {Your Feed Title}
```

Next comes an optional description of the capsule served by the feed, on a new line prefixed by the "description" keyword, a colon, and whitespace.
```
description: {Your feed description}
```

After that, a valid, Gemini-formatted link to the feed's capsule, using an absolute URL, with the "home" keyword.
```
=> {your gemlog URL} home
```

Next comes the maintainer's email link, formatted as a valid Gemini email address with the "maintainer" keyword.
```
=> mailto:{your@email.address} maintainer
```

Then, each article in the feed would be listed in Gemini link format, with a few provisos.

```
=> [1] [2] [3]
```

1. The file paths should be absolute URLs so that the feed will point to the same resources even if the identical text was published on another server.
2. The first string following any whitespace should be a publication timestamp, which could be any string that would be a valid datetime attribute for the <time> element in HTML5:

=> https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-time-element The time element

3. After the timestamp, whitespace would set off the article's title, which can be any string allowed as link text in Gemini.

That's all! A title, optional description, URL, maintainer email, and list of links showing dates—all formatted as valid gemtext.

One more idea, which I propose as an optional standard: The feed file would be named "gms.gmi"—GMS for Gemini Syndication.

Is that simple enough? Comprehensive enough? Could it even be useful, or would publishers just use JSON or some other standard to syndicate their content? Has someone else already developed something along these lines? Or something contrary?

Using gemtext for everything means such pages could double as archive pages. If aggregators were configured to ignore all other text besides those items denoted above, then publishers might even add category or periodic headings between list links, but my preference is to keep it simple.

What do you think?

~gaptooth
=> mailto:gaptooth@sdf.org <gaptooth@sdf.org>

=> ../ Home
=> ../gms.gmi Feed

---
title:      Simple Gemini Syndication?
author:     Gaptooth
editor:     neovim v0.4.4
published:  2021-05-07
modified:   2021-05-07
---