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Stretching the specs of text/gemini and favicon.txt

ANSI art

As you might have guessed, I have a certain liking to ANSI art. That's one reason I wrote and maintain

gemini://ansi.hrtk.in/

(blog post about it; https)

I found the Moebius ANSI editor some time ago. This week I started playing around with it. I can't draw or paint or anything; I've tried but I'm not gifted at all and never had the motivation to really learn. Now, first time in my life, I felt like I was making something visually interesting. Of course I'm a total beginner, but trying to create ANSI art is fun.

I updated my front page to include an ANSI art banner and an "about me" section with a humble self portrait.

Now, there's been discussion about ANSI escapes in text/gemini and I've been somewhat opposed to them. But it's part of the hacker ethos to bend the rules and to even outright disobey, so don't expect me to act smart in my own space.

There are good reasons to strip ANSI escapes. I'd even say it should be the default that clients do, unless they can fully parse and contain them. But my content works with ANSI escapes stripped, and the visitor loses very little even if the whole preformatted blocks are not rendered at all.

favicon.txt

Another thing I did was add a favicon.

Against the RFC (which itself is of course unofficial).

I dislike emoji, but there are nice characters in unicode. So I'm now serving favicon.txt with the character 𝖍. I'm not yet sure if any client displays that.

I have two questions regarding the spec:

1) Why only emoji?

2) Why favicons at all?