Lexicons For Standardized Facets

[zicklag]

I wanted to open the discussion around having standardized facets for things like you might find in basic markdown: bold, italic, quote blocks, and more.

I'm working on Roomy Chat and we decided that using facets makes the most sense as the native storage format for our rich text chat messages.

But the only facets standardized on in BlueSky are mentions, tags, and links.

You can add your own facets with a custom $type, and could easily use an NSID for that, but it would make the most sense to me if we had lexicons defining standard facets types and what fields they'd have.

For example, just off the top of my head we'd want things like:

• embeds: think Discourse on-box style link embeds
• bold
• italic
• quotes
• headings
• ordered and unordered lists
• tables
• IFrames
• spoilers

It would be good if there were standard lexicons for these things so that each new app could use, where available, existing facet types with specific schemas.

For Roomy, the idea right now is we'll just add custom $types like chat.room.facet.bold, but if something more standard develops it'd be great to use that instead.

We will still have custom types, like when you link to a Roomy thread, we'll have a custom facet that has the global thread ID instead of specific URL, and then our app will display an internal ink to the thread, styled as a badge with the thread name or something like that.

But that's also part of the beauty of facets is that we can combine standardized and custom ones, and 3rd party apps will be able to understand our standardized ones, and display the custom ones as plain text.

[snarfed]

Hoo boy. Thorny one! @zicklag I assume you've seen bluesky-social/atproto#2830 ?

[zicklag]

No, actually, I haven't seen that yet. 👌

That proposal seems pretty sensible to me. I think it resolves the problems implied by this comment, hehe:

please don't do facets like we did. only pain lies in that direction

That proposal, though seems slightly tangential to the question of having standardized facet types like com.atproto.richtext.bold, if I understand correctly. We'd still have to come up with standardized facet schemas.

[zicklag]

It's worth noting that after posting this I realized that for Roomy, using Automerge's built-in Rich Text solution, which actually has a "mark" system very similar to facets, makes the most sense in our case.

That said, I think having standardized facets is something that makes sense for AtProto apps, we might still want to use NSIDs as our mark identifiers, so that they could possibly be converted losslessly into AtProto facets if that became helpful later.