Text reflow woes (or: I want bullets back!)y

Here's a question which is going to sound aggressive or confrontational
but is actually just me trying to help all of us (myself included)
clarify our thinking and start moving in the direction of a deicision:



Given that, thanks to the inclusion of MIME types in the response
header, Gemini is already perfectly capable of serving of Markdown, and
given that Markdown is powerful enough to completely replicate all of
the semantics currently in the text/gemini spec (i.e. it can link to
other places via URL with a user-friendly label attached), what do we
actually stand to gain by speccing text/gemini up as something which is,
roughly, just Markdown with perhaps a few features removed and its
native linking syntax replaced by our own line-based => alternative?
Isn't this line of thought just leading us in the direction of
substantial duplication of effort and having two redundant ways to do
more or less the same thing?  Isn't that, generally speaking, a pretty
bad way to design things?

If the answer to "what do we actually stand to gain?" is "Hmm, not much,
actually" then it seems sensible to me that we should back away from
this direction.

If the answer is "We gain X, Y and Z", then the syntax, then we can do
our best to design syntax which maximises X, Y and Z.

Either answer clarifies things for us.

-Solderpunk

On Sun, Aug 18, 2019 at 02:54:39PM +0000, solderpunk wrote:
> > Personally, what I would most like to see in a client is a large subset
> > of Markdown (no embedded HTML, probably no inline images). But all of
> > the CommonMark text properties, levels of headings, etc. In general, I
> > would like for reasonable typography to be what you think of when you
> > think of a Gemini page. I understand that this makes things
> > significantly harder for client implementors.
> 
> I too would be very happy if Gemini developed a reputation for nice,
> functional typography.  None of the features you propose strike me as
> problematic.  I especially like the levels of headings idea.  Not just
> for the visual aspect, but because it allows, like the Markdown browser
> you shared a link to, a nice navigational sidebar for large structured
> documents, which is very much a good thing.
> 
> > That's one reason why I've suggested ratfactor's Text Junior format (can
> > someone invite ratfactor? I don't have any means of contacting them) as
> > a standard format for Gemini. It is basically a large subset of
> > Markdown, but fully line-oriented and stripped of parsing ambiguities. A
> > simple client can either just cat(1) it, can fmt(1) everything that's
> > not wrapped in a ``` ``` block, or can apply full formatting. Everything
> > I have served on my Gemini site is legal Text Junior.
> 
> Text Junior seems nice and I'm not opposed to using it or something very
> similar to it as a basis for Gemini.  But the current worst shortcoming,
> IMHO, of the very minimal "yeah, you can reflow stuff if you like"
> Gemini spec is that it wrecks nicely formatted lists, and as far as I can
> see TJ doesn't currently handle that either.
> 
> -Solderpunk
>

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