[Greasemonkey] More metadata again

[Ondřej Kučera]

Hello!

Sorry to bring this up again but I'm new to this maillist and can't 
reply to the messages about this topic that I found in the archives.

I'm actually new to the user scripts themselves, I found out about them 
only after Opera introduced them in version 8.0. But I liked the idea, 
so I tried to find out more and of course tried to write some user 
scripts. But immediately after I wrote first one that could be used by 
more people than just myself, I felt that there should be more metadata 
possibilities, and I'll try to explain why.

First of all, there should be @author, because I don't know but it seems 
just obvious to me that one should have a way to say who wrote it, maybe 
even provide an e-mail address.

Also I like the idea of @version. I know that for GreaseMonkey 
developers it is not that much important because the directory has its 
own versioning but I think that not every user script will end in this 
directory (especially now when user scripts will be written also be 
people using Opera and not knowing much about Firefox and GreaseMonkey) 
- actually I have a user script that can be used at two small Czech 
discussion boards and I highly doubt that the central directory is 
interested in user scripts like this because that would sooner or later 
mean such number of user scripts that no one would be able to find anything.
I know that every author can version their scripts in any way they like 
but it would still be nice if there was some written "standard" provided 
by authors of GreaseMonkey so that all (or most of) user scripts would 
follow the same template in this.

But maybe most important metadata that I lack is a way to tell in which 
encoding the user script is written. Because right now it is impossible 
to add some text to the document in almost any other language than 
English which pretty downgrades many possibilities of user scripting. 
This actually may be a little tricky, I don't know how exactly 
GreaseMonkey cooperates with Gecko itself but I tried to use in a user 
script the same encoding as is used by the page I was modifying - that 
didn't work, and then I tried to use utf-8 (as the most common universal 
encoding) and that didn't work either. It would be really fine if I 
could use something like @charset utf-8 in the same meaning as <script 
type="text/javascript" src="my.user.js" charset="utf-8"></script>.

I believe that other people could come up with other examples of useful 
metadata (or maybe they already did) and that it would be nice if the 
GreaseMonkey authors took the best of them and just put it into the 
table on the "Writing user scripts" page - even if these additional 
metadata tags had absolutely nothing to do with the GreaseMonkey 
directory or search engine. Just to tell the community that if they want 
to say who's the author, they should do it this way, if they want to 
provide a version, they should do it that way. I mean it's not crucial 
but probably a lot of people would welcome it.

Greetings from Ondřej Kučera