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

spc writes:
>  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.

I agree with that proposal wholeheartedly. It creates one additional simple
parse case for fixed lines (that will not be truncated to N characters if they
go beyond). But I do not think that additional parse to implement adds
any major work or complexity to clients.

I am of the opinions that link lines _should_ wrap. My reason for this
is that many people may want to do url only links:

=> gemini://this.is.a/url/to/some/place_or_other?it-has-a-data-component-th
at-exceeds-the-limit-of-characters

It is reasonable to want to see the whole link before following it.

So, I am in favor of:

1. Regular text and links both wrap to n (tbd) characters
2. A leading space creates a non-wrapping line that will
   be truncated at n (tbd) characters if it exceeds that
   number of chars. Clients can optionally add an ellipses.

One thing to consider with wrapping or truncating links is that many
terminal based clients will implement links with numbers. Given that
those numbers will be based by the number of links on a page, it will
be difficult for content authors to predict what the behavior of longer
lines will be (where something might wrap or get cut) in order to make
room for interface elements such as:
=> A link
13 => A link
[13] A link
(13) A link
( 13) => A link
Any of those are reasonable and possible ways a client can represent
a link on the screen. Because how clients do this will vary, things can
get unpredictable. As such, what happens at what boundary should, I
believe, be a part of the spec. So that people can know what to expect.
They should also expect differing clients to render things mildly differently
and not rely on very long lines to always appear identically.

As a side note: I agree that accessibility is a solid concern.

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