from julian@community.nodebb.org to swicg-threadiverse-wg@community.nodebb.org on 16 May 2024 20:53
https://community.nodebb.org/post/99736
At the last ForumWG meeting, we discussed at length about Article vs. Note, and whether there was a desire to expand usage of as:Article
. You can review those minutes here.
One of the action items that came out was to collate the state of current implementations. Unfortunately, outside of implementations that federate non-textual content (e.g. Pixelfed Stories, Mobilizon Events, etc.), the majority of implementors just use as:Note
, which is not surprising given Mastodon's treatment of non-Note objects.
You can see the results of the summary here.
What is less clear is whether there is pent-up demand for use of a different data type for more richly forrmatted content. @mikedev@fediversity.site and @jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu provided some very illuminating history behind previous attempts to use as:Article
, but importantly it seems that Mastodon (via @renchap@oisaur.com) may be open to supporting this in some form as well.
While Mastodon has every reason to display as:Note
as it sees fit, I'd like to hopefully address the undue influence towards using it especially in instances where as:Article
were more appropriate. Mike (upthread) suggested a compromise:
- that
as:Note
be reserved for content with attachments (images or otherwise), perhaps with a limited subset of html - and
as:Article
be used for content with a richer set of html (e.g. tables), and including the ability to display inline images
I explicitly did not specify that Note was for shorter content and Article for longer, because there exist plenty of examples of the reverse.
Does anybody see potential complications from such an arrangement?
#activitypub #activitystreams #forumwg #swicg-threadiverse-wg
threaded - newest
@julian
I would actually really like to use Article to encapsulate rich multi-page and potentially mixed-media content. For example, think of the 1609 project website. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html
Or imagine an academic paper where you could bookmark, comment, and share subsections of the document. Like the abstract, diagrams, and conclusions.
Which is not to argue against accepting a larger html subset. Just not to make that the limit of our imagination.
@mikedev @jupiter_rowland @renchap
julian: Mike (upthread) suggested a compromise: that as:Note be reserved for content with attachments (images or otherwise), perhaps with a limited subset of html and as:Article be used for content with a richer set of html (e.g. tables), and including the ability to display inline images I explicitly did not specify that Note was for shorter content and Article for longer, because there exist plenty of examples of the reverse. Does anybody see potential complications from such an arrangement? I think the distinction that makes sense to me is still "do you intend for this to be formally published or not". Length and formatting are red herrings. The entire Note vs Article "distinction" is literally just "tweet vs blog post" in how it came about. From the perspective of a service like Twitter or Facebook, the Note indicates it's a "status update" whereas the Article indicates it should be shown/presented in their article publishing feature (which Twitter ironically called Notes). Consider this litmus test: if viewing the object at a permalink, does it make sense on its own, or do you need more context? If you need more context, it's probably a Note. If it makes sense on its own, it's probably an Article. (Note that this doesn't prevent Articles from having a context property.)
@trwnh@socialhub.activitypub.rocks even that has it's own exceptions. This very topic's OP was meant to be a reply to the original Article vs. Note vs. Page topic, but I decided to make it a standalone topic for tagging purposes.
That's why I still feel that we can use simpler heuristics based on content to determine whether one ought to use Article or Note...
But a part of me worries that we're heading down this road trying to figure out whether we can heuristically determine an object type, when we should be asking whether we should.
@julian
+1
Article
= rich content, embedded images, videos, and other media.But how embedded images should be treated by implementations that use media cache? Are they expected to rewrite
src
attributes in images?@jupiter_rowland @renchap @mikedev
That's what we do today. Would be interested in alternative approaches. We don't even try and cache audio/video.
@mikedev@fediversity.site @silverpill@mitra.social I'd recommend we discuss the merits and complexities of media caching separately, if only because I'm certain we could bikeshed that one for days! <img alt="🤣" src="https://community.nodebb.org/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f923.png?v=6sqpsn8bgmv">
@silverpill @jupiter_rowland @renchap @mikedev @julian
Socialhome supports inline images in posts. Are those
as:Note
oras:Article
?I think they're as:Note just like streams. Hopefully we can soon move them all to as:Article like I proposed 7-8 years ago and everything will look as the authors intended and everybody will be happy.
@tallship I don't know. Could you provide an example of such post?
@julian
@silverpill@mitra.social:
I believe @tallship@public.mitra.social was referring to the fact that the software itself supports inline images locally. Well, sure, who doesn't? (Except for Mastodon lol)
The problem lies with everybody federating
as:Note
out because Mastodon doesn't rendercontent
otherwise, and also that all images are stripped out unless included asattachment
, and only then, in reverse order with a cap at 4 images.cc @mikedev@fediversity.site
@silverpill @julian
Silverpill wrote:
> Could you provide an example of such post?
Here you go bro: Socialhome post w/inline images.
I'll try to give it a boost from my #Mitra, #Hubzilla, and #Friendica accounts too (if I haven't already) so you can study/compare the various treatment cases :)
Sadly, I have not yet launched streams yet for study. I know, I'm a lame-O. I'll get to it shortly, prolly just spin up a local VM on Proxmox for that here, I really am anxious to give it a go :)
#tallship #inline_media
⛵
.
@tallship @julian
>Here you go bro: Socialhome post w/inline images.
It is a
Note
. I think this is a good example of a post which is best viewed on the original site.I'm still catching up on the whole discussion, but I'd mention that WriteFreely sends out
Article
s by default, with a config option to sendNote
s instead.I've experimented with automatically falling back to
Note
if a post has only one paragraph, but agreed that's not a great distinction. (And I don't think an automatic switch should be needed for a platform like ours.)Definitely inclined to agree with @trwnh that intent makes the difference. Since WF is meant for blogging / long-form, where each Actor has a unique webpage,
Article
was the easy choice. The hope was that other platforms would figure out UX on the other end eventually.Thanks @thebaer@socialhub.activitypub.rocks! That's good feedback and it's really exciting to know that there exist implementors out there whose default is not
Note
.I think at this point a real-time discussion at the next ForumWG re: the distinction between Article vs. Note would be beneficial. It'd be a continuation of the discussion we had last month.
It's clear there are varied opinions on it, but as intimated by others, this might not actually be a problem that has technical solution.