More thoughts about changes to twtxt (as if we haven’t had enough thoughts):

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.)

  3. 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.

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