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

• 🗣️ From: Aaron Janse (aaron (a) ajanse.me)
• 📅 Sent: 2020-01-18 19:20
• 📧 Message 121 of 148

I think we made an oversight: syntax nested within quotes.

For example:

 ```gemini
> > It looks like things are moving along, I wonder if we forgot anything
> > that would make us need to read more than three chars to specify the
> > line type?
> 
> Here's a site to demo gemini's syntax:
> => gemini://example.com Gemini Syntax Demo
> 
> In the future, we can add the following features:
> * foo
> * bar

Client:
 *doesn't know to make quoted link clickable*
 *doesn't know to fancy-render the quoted list*
 ```

---

Regardless, here are my thoughts on everything else...

I definitely love:


	
The use of asterisks only for unordered lists
	
The use of plus signs for ordered lists. I wish markdown had this!
	
Repeated list markers (*/+) to indicate depth
	
Stateless line-by-line parsing


Changes I think we should make to the spec spec, based on what I've read
here and my own opinion:


	
Preformatted text toggle lines only need to *start* with three

  backticks. Specify the significance of text after the backticks.
  
  Some ideas:
    * It's permitted in order to please markdown users. Ignore it
    * Display it to the user (could be position in file, language, etc)
    * Use it for syntax highlighting


	
Specify that preformatted code blocks are intended for content such as

  ascii art and code, meaning that it should be easily copy-pasteable
  into a text editor without needed to undergo extra steps to revert it
  from its displayed form to its original form


	
Add horizontal rule lines (three+ dashes)



	
Specify that ordered lists MUST use plus sign markers



	
Specify Tomasino's nested list system



	
Explicitly specify markdown syntax that is not allowed. Random idea,

  but maybe we could even advise clients to shame this syntax the same
  way modern web browsers are shaming non-HTTP sites? Regardless, here
  are some things that I think we should explicitly ban in text/gemini: 
  * Ordered lists using letters or numberal markers
  * Indented markdown lists
  * Unordered lists starting with a dash
  * Embedded HTML
  * Markdown images
  * Tables in non-preformatted text blocks
  * Hard-wrapping quotes
  * Hard-wrapping text
  * Horizontal rules with anything other than three+ dashes
  * Expecting anything special when a line ends with whitespace

Are we really limited to a max depth of three? Even if we allow unlimited
depth of headers and lists, clients would only need to read the first two
chars of a line to determine its type (unless we add horizontal rules,
in which case we'd need to read three characters).

> Hmm.  I would want to think a bit before I lay down a hard statement on
> this because I don't want to impose too much of my own ideology on
> Gemini, as it's supposed to be a general-purpose tool....but I am not
> excited by verbatim dragging of mainstream web 2.0 cultural concepts
> like comment threads into Gemini.

Well, worst case scenario, if someone really badly wants comment threads,
maybe they could use nested quote blocks (assuming we figure that out).

Cheers!

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