Neutral Progress

A couple of posts recently have talked about how to make progress on the Gemini spec.

In particular, this post from freezr:

Four years of Gemini

As you know by now, I always have loose change; here are two more cents from me.

In my experience, reaching consensus on a technical topic usually happens because someone is willing to put in the work; but that work is not decision making, it’s consensus building.

In this case, for any point in the spec that’s up for discussion, there are some very concrete things that any participant in the discussion can do to make progress.

Compliance Tests

You might remember the “acid tests” for HTML rendering:

The Second Acid Test

Because they allowed anyone to easily test a client for compliance with the standards, they were a major unifying force for the web.

Something similar for Gemtext that explores current points of disagreement between clients and relates them back to the standard would be great.

And for the network protocol, client and server compliance tests can be automated rather than visual.

State of the World

Once there are tests, it would be possible to survey clients and servers to find out how much of the spec they follow—and what common behaviour exists on top of the spec.

This information can turn into a “state of the world” report that ties actual client and server behaviour back to discussions on particular points. This would let us compare actual implemented behaviour with the spec and with community thoughts about possible extensions to the spec.

If something is widely implemented and widely considered a good idea, then it’s obviously a prime candidate for “speccification”. If not—well, the bar should be very high, I think. Implementers can “vote” by changing their implementations, if they like.

Work is Work

Of course, this would be quite some work.

For now I prefer to focus on posting non-Gemini-related posts, or I would consider trying it myself—it should be fun.

But at the minute, I find enjoying Gemini as it is to be more important than pushing it forward—or in any other direction.

Feedback 📮

👍 Thanks!

👎 Not for me.

🤷 No opinion.

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