The summary
property can be used for providing summaries of objects, both activities and other things, as HTML text. I’m wondering how much to use/reuse/abuse this property. For example, if users of my software write one-line plain-text descriptions for some objects, I can publish those using summary
, putting the text inside a <p>
tag or something. But is that a good idea?
Pros:
- Use an existing ActivityPub property
Cons:
- It’s HTML, so all the guarantees and assumptions about the content are lost (e.g. if I want to embed it in a web page, I can’t assume it’s a one-line text etc., it’s basically an arbitrary chunk of HTML from another server
- “summary” and “description” aren’t the same thing, so the name can be a bit misleading. You can describe a banana but you probably wouldn’t “summarize” a banana.
I’m leaning towards not using summary
for anything but the general case where some arbitrary-HTML summary of something is provided. For everything else, including all cases where the description of something is known to be plain text, or needs to be a single-line text, or any requirement that is more specific than just-arbitrary-HTML-fallback-because-idk-how-to-display-this-object, use other properties.
How does this sound? I want to pick properties for stuff in ForgeFed, and replace all my uses of summary
(e.g. for descriptions of repositories) with other properties (whether standard AP or external/extension). If that doesn’t sound right to someone, please explain