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

> 
> I agree that there's a certain amount of
> excitement associated the unexplored
> possibilities associated with a new format.
> Not only would a convention of wrapping
> Gemini content at 45 chars effectively remove
> the need to add enough markdup to the spec to
> facilitate near reflow, it could, like you
> say, give the medium a distinctie look and
> feel and encourage interesting new
> developments like multi-column layouts.
> 
> My biggest concern at this point is that link
> labels could easily exceed 45 chars and then
> clients need to come up with a nice way to
> wrap them...

  The link format:

=> link-URL link-text

  You could state that the link-text should be 45 characters or less, and if
not given, then the link-URL should be truncated at 42 characters, with
"..." added on the end for display (if less than 42 characters, then no need
for the "..." at the end).

  In Lua, this would be:

	if #linkurl > 42 then
	  linktext = linkurl:sub(1,42) .. "..."
	end

  In a string-hostile language like C:

	char buffer[46];

	if (strlen(linkurl) > 42)
	  snprintf(buffer,sizeof(buffer),"*.*s...",42,42,linkurl);

  So I don't think it's a hard thing to do.

> > Perhaps the largest downside of using a fixed width format is that you lose
> > accessibility. People with reduced vision might want/need to use a larger font
> > than average. With re-flowed text this is easy because the text will wrap to
> > fit their screen. Also, I've heard that screen readers work poorly with hard
> > line wraps, although I can't find a citation for that.
> 
> This is a bit of a concern.  I noticed that
> dgold recently removed all ASCII art from
> their phlog for accessibility reasons - see
> gopher://ascraeus.org/0/phlog/030.txt.

  Or how about:  lines that start with '=>' are links and are handled
differently, lines starting with a ' ' are fixed (but should be
less than N characters in length), and starting with any other character
should be reflowed until a blank line, a line staring with '=>' or
whitespace.

  So this wouldn't be reflowed.
But this would
reflow because it doesn't start with a whitespace
=> example:foo link text is handled differently.

  -spc (Just some thoughts ... )

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