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

🗣️ From: solderpunk (solderpunk (a) SDF.ORG)
📅 Sent: 2020-01-21 20:06
📧 Message 141 of 148

Okay, it looks like we are not as close to a consensus as I had hoped or
imagined.  That's fine.  I don't want to rush this process, as much as
I'm looking forward to it being over.  I wonder if we can make a simple
incremental improvement to the spec-spec now, though, using some of the
ideas that have come out of this latest round of discussion.

As a reminder, the current spec-spec, version 0.9.2, basically defines
text/gemini thusly:


	Lines beginning with => are links
	Links must always be displayed on their own lines
	All other lines are just text
	Text may be optionally reflowed as per RFC 1896, i.e. by turning

  isolated newlines into spaces and N consecutive newlines into N
  consecutive newlines.

That's it.

This format:


	Gives us links
	Results in nice text on arbitrary width screens
	Completely breaks lists like this one by joining all items

  together

(this last point kicked off this gigantic email thread)

We could change this to the following:


	Lines beginning with => are links
	Links must always be displayed on their own lines
	All other lines are just text
	Lines of text wider than the screen should be wrapped to fit the

  screen, but no RFC 1896 style mangling of newlines is allowed

	Authors are strongly encouraged not to hard-wrap their text but to

  write long lines instead.

This format:


	Gives us links
	Results in nice text on arbitrary width screens
	Lets lists like this one work just fine


i.e. it solves the problem that kicked off this email thread, without
sacrificing support for arbitary screen width - at the cost of requiring
that clients be able to wrap lines.

Does anybody *disagree* that this change by itself would improve the
current spec-spec?

I think this is, in fact, the smallest possible change to the current
spec-spec which solves my original complaint without sacrificing support
for arbitrary screen width.  So maybe I should rephrase that question:

Would anybody *prefer* that we spec hard-wrapping to some specified
length (80, 40, whatever) over speccing the above "long line" solution?
Please speak up if so!

Cheers,
Solderpunk

---

Previous in thread (140 of 148): 🗣️ James Tomasino (tomasino (a) lavabit.com)

Next in thread (142 of 148): 🗣️ Jason McBrayer (jmcbray (a) carcosa.net)

View entire thread.