Idea: Badge Button Sharing Standard!

[vvinrg]

I'll write a python module for this, why not.

[vvinrg]

Thoughts while I work on implementing code to parse this:

I propose the following form for comments on all list files:

Code

## This will be reproduced later-on.
# This will be discarded.
## This will get tacked on to the end.
foo
bar
# This will also be discarded.
foobar

This would be parsed into something of the form:

Code

[
  {
    "comment": "This will be reproduced later on. This will get tacked on to the end.",
    "entry": "foo"
  },
  {
    "comment": null,
    "entry": "bar"
  },
  {
    "comment": null,
    "entry": "foobar"
  }
]

The procedure while parsing should be to accumulate double-hash comments until reaching a line with no comments, and then pushing the structure containing the concatenated double-hash comments and the line with no comments. I think it would be useful to allow people to specify extra info about their buttons, just for fun.


The following forms should be supported for friends.txt entries:

Code

example.com
example.com/BBSS/
https://example.com
https://example.com/BBSS/

Each of these will yield the same actual URL for where to find BBSS-related files. The second and forth forms should be considered special-cases for people operating on webhosts which give subdirectories instead of subdomains, in which case they may contain something like `tilde.example/~foo/BBSS/`.


I'd appreciate any thoughts on these ideas.

[Melooon]

@vvinrg These all seem like super solid choices and I'd fully support them  The URL formats is a really good idea since people would almost certainly add URLs that are not perfectly formatted; I would even add a fall back so if someone uses a totally incorrect URL like "bob.com/pasta.html" it tries to look at the base domain anyway "https://bob.com/BBSS"

I think the main sticking point people had with this idea was that they found the folder name "BBSS" confusing; we never really came up with a perfect solution for that; some people seemed to prefer "badges" as a root folder, whereas others just wanted "88x31" as the root folder and no support for other sizes.

[vvinrg]

I think I'll end up checking [provided] -> "/BBSS/" -> "/badges/".

[vvinrg]

Update on implementation: deciding to make a bad path a hard fail, but having the following defaults to check for a missing path: "/BBSS/", "/.well-known/BBSS/", "/badges/", "/buttons/", and "/". I think it should be configurable? But IDK how python module imports work soo...

[vvinrg]

hihihi im not dead i just got swamped with college but it's winter break so im working on documenting the python module! coming up next is a set of BBSS sites to test with and a javascript impl.

@Melooon would you mind my writing some proper docs and a getting started guide for the format as a whole?