On Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 1:43 PM solderpunk <solderpunk at sdf.org> wrote: > > Okay, I have started to re-engage with this endless discussion - > slowly and, I have to admit, reluctantly. When I think about how many > details there are to consider here, how many different options we have > to choose among, and how absolutely incredible the power-to-weight > ratio is of verbatim fixed-width text with a predefined width (I > mean, really, you can: > > Left align text, > center text, > even right align text > > without the client having to even know what those things are!), it's > incredibly tempting to echo the "reflowed text be damned!" sentiment > recently expressed at mozz.us[1] and spec 40 character fixed text and > just move on. For what it's worth, I have been trying out the 40-character width thing for a while now and I'm really enjoying it! I actually find it a lot more pleasant to type vs 80 character lines. I don't know if it's because my eyes don't need to jump as far, or because it takes fewer keystrokes to move my cursor to the middle of a line... Something about it just *feels* good to type. Not to mention, pages like this [1] display perfectly on my iphone using a gemini-http proxy server. Regardless of whether you choose to adopt the ``` mode, you're still going to need to recommend a line length for authors to hard wrap their text/gemini files at. And I suggest that 40 is still worth considering for this. > Gopher is better than the current Gemini spec in this regard, because > you can put gophermap lines in an item type 0 text file no problem and > they'll just be displayed as-is. But copying and pasting that > gophermap is not guaranteed to go smoothly. With terminal-based > applications, the tabs would stand a good chance of being transformed > into consecutive spaces, which would actually break them. Let's be > better than that! Let's make it possible to display, copy and paste > Gemini links inside of Gemini documents, to facilitate teaching and > talking about Gemini over Gemini. It seems quite natural that this > should be possible. > > Even if text/gemini were specced at 40 fixed-width characters with no > reflow, meeting this goal would require some syntax comparable to > <pre> tags in HTML, to switch off processing of Gemini links. If > we're going to have that anyway, we may as well have reflowed text be > the default and this <pre> syntax can do double duty by also enabling > non-reflowed text for source code, poetry, etc. Here are some other alternatives that might be worth considering. I do think that displaying gemini links is a valid use-case, but adding a whole new preformatted text mode only for this narrow case feels a bit heavy-handed to me. Granted, I realize there are other benefits to the preformatted mode that have already been outlined. Option 1. Use a no-op link Pick a URL that by convention doesn't lead anywhere useful, and then hijack the (link friendly name) portion to display your gemini link. =># =>/about.txt About "#" is a valid relative URL, right? Somebody else on this list *cough* sean might be able to some up with something better. This would be displayed on most gemini clients as: =>/about.txt About The line would be highlighted as a link (unless clients choose to handle this special case), but otherwise it should work without any changes to the spec. Option 2. Use text/plain For the narrow use-case where you want to show off some examples of gemini links, stick those links in a separate text/plain document. Or just serve your whole page as text/plain. The example links can't intermingle with real gemini links in the same document, but is that really such a big deal? How you feel about this option likely depends on which side of the fence you fall on regarding text/gemini usage. Should text/gemini be used like HTML is on the web, with most content being written as gemini files? Or should it be more like gopher, where directories are type text/gemini but many people write their blog posts and other leaf documents as text/plain. Lately I have been leaning more towards the second interpretation. Take another example: Instead of writing a python code snippet inline in a text/gemini document, what if you instead added a link to your code snippet and served it as "text/x-python"? This feels natural to me given that other media content like images also can't be displayed inline. [1] https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mozz.us/diagnostics/2020-01-08/notes.gmi - mozz
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