Let us talk about de facto standards

8

At a high level I certainly agree.

And things like shared names, especially under the $:/wiki/ namespace are clear and easy wins. Any user who wants the same information under a different name, say, “License”, could simply transclude $:/wiki/license, but common tools could count on this tiddler either being available or at the very least having a standard meaning if it does exist.

Agreed tiddler formats is harder; I’d love to hear more about what you’re considering.

The same is true with field names and functions. I think it would be difficult to find common names that people are not already using, and which they’d be loathe to change. We could overcome this by using the same sort of namespacing for certain fields, the way we do for system tiddlers. But that’s a bit ugly.

I don’t understand what you mean by this:

What sort of standardization are you suggesting here?

That sounds useful. But how would you suggest standardizing this? Would there be a standard implementation that users could simply import, a plugin or json-tiddler? Would there just be standard naming that any such tool creates to support interoperability? Something else?

I think I’d need to hear more, and especially more specific examples to be sure, but I think it’s a good idea. Do you have any more concrete suggestions?

I can imagine a document that includes in part something like this:

  1. Well-known tiddlers

    • $:/wiki/about: A brief overview of the purpose and contents of the wiki

      For example,

      While other wikis discuss the U.S.'s Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches, here we
      take on the most familiar parts of the U.S. Government:

      • The Bureau of Red Tape
      • The Department of Redundancy Department

    • $:/wiki/authors: A bulleted list of authors responsible for the wiki.

      For example,

    • $:/wiki/license: The license under which the wiki is shared. This should be either

      • The text of the license used by the wiki, or
      • [optionally a brief introduction to the license, and] a link to the location of the license.

      For example,

      Copyright (c) 2012-2023 John Doe and others

      Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
      a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
      “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
      without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
      distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
      permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
      the following conditions:

      The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
      included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

      THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
      EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
      MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
      NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
      HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
      WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
      FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
      OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

      or

      This wiki is shared using the CC-BY-4.0 license.

    • etc.

But that’s specifically for the simplest bit, tiddlers with well-known names. I’d be curious to see what you might mean for the other ideas.