More thoughts about changes to twtxt (as if we haven’t had enough thoughts):
- There are lots of great ideas here! Is there a benefit to putting them all into one document? Seems to me this could more easily be a bunch of separate efforts that can progress at their own pace:
1a. Better and longer hashes.
1b. New possibly-controversial ideas like edit: and delete: and location-based references as an alternative to hashes.
1c. Best practices, e.g. Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
1d. Stuff already described at dev.twtxt.net that doesn’t need any changes.
We won’t know what will and won’t work until we try them. So I’m inclined to think of this as a bunch of draft ideas. Maybe later when we’ve seen it play out it could make sense to define a group of recommended twtxt extensions and give them a name.
Another reason for 1 (above) is: I like the current situation where all you need to get started is these two short and simple documents:
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/discoverability.html
and everything else is an extension for anyone interested. (Deprecating non-UTC times seems reasonable to me, though.) Having a big long “twtxt v2” document seems less inviting to people looking for something simple. (@prologic@twtxt.net you mentioned an anonymous comment “you’ve ruined twtxt” and while I don’t completely agree with that commenter’s sentiment, I would feel like twtxt had lost something if it moved away from having a super-simple core.)All that being said, these are just my opinions, and I’m not doing the work of writing software or drafting proposals. Maybe I will at some point, but until then, if you’re actually implementing things, you’re in charge of what you decide to make, and I’m grateful for the work.