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?
