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dat.json

The WIP specification for the dat.json meta format.

{
  "title": "My paper library",
  "author": "Julian Gruber <julian@juliangruber.com>",
  "url": "dat://c75ffb161a9965e47323ba9b76aa11f649504b0d2d5d062dcb3438d5aeadc187",
  "links": {
    "license": [{"href": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/", "title": "CC BY-NC 2.5"}]
  }
}

Specification

Add a dat.json with any of those keys - all are optional - to the root of a dat archive to help tooling work with your archive more nicely:

.title

A short but descriptive human friendly title.

.description

A one- or two-line description of the archive.

.url

Url of the Dat archive. This will usually be the dat:// then the archive key.

.author

The archive's author - the packager, not necessarily the data's author as well. Can be either an object with any of those keys:

{
  "name": "Julian Gruber",
  "email": "julian@juliangruber.com",
  "web": "https://juliangruber.com"
}

or a string with at least the name and any of the segments email and web:

"NAME <EMAIL> (WEB)"

like for example:

• "Julian Gruber"
• "Julian Gruber <julian@juliangruber.com>"
• "Julian Gruber (https://juliangruber.com/)"
• "Julian Gruber <julian@juliangruber.com> (https://juliangruber.com/)"

.links

An object containing a set of Web links from the Dat. It is a mapping of "rel" values to arrays of link objects, as follows:

{
  "rel-type": [{"href": "https://.../"}]
}

The .links follows the same schema as Web links and so any attribute which applies to a <link> will apply to these values. The one difference is how the rel value is handled: in this field, the rel is used as the key of the links map. Only one rel value should be used. If a link has additional rel values, it can specify them using the rel field on the link object. For instance, a link with the rel value of "foo bar baz" would look like this:

{
  "foo": [{"href": "https://.../", "rel": "bar baz"}]
}

Links can be duplicated, and so it would also be possible to handle this case with 3 different link objects:

{
  "foo": [{"href": "https://.../"}],
  "bar": [{"href": "https://.../"}],
  "baz": [{"href": "https://.../"}],
}

Support

• Dat-Desktop will use .title to display a nice archive name instead of just its key