💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 000397.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 02:35:58. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG
Sun Jan 19 22:18:26 GMT 2020
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ``` On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 08:01:23PM +0000, solderpunk wrote: > The fractured Geminispace thing is a real concern, but actually I think > an argument can be made in both ways here. If text/gemini is kept > extremely simple and plain and the official policy is "Serve Markdown or > HTML if you want even basic text styling" then people may well do that. > Some clients will add support for rendering those but many won't because > it's so much more complicated (far worse than what has been proposed > here!). Then we end up with two regions of Geminispace, the text/gemini > subspace which anybody can visit and the Markdown subspace which only > people using the fanciest clients can visit. IMHO, this is a worse kind > of fracturing than one where we adopt the proposed new text/gemini > syntax and different clients implement different subsets of the optional > features. After all, the only reason I've been so positive about these > recently proposed changes is that they all seem to degrade very > gracefully if a client doesn't recognise them and treats them equivalent > to text. The degree of fracturing possible is actually very slight. Oh, there was also the argument made at some point that if Geminidoesn't have any standardised syntax for these common formatting tasks,ambitious clients might start trying to recognise the most popularnon-standard ways of doing it, which could easily lead to divergentimplementations across clients. So, better to provide a standard way todo to provide us control and uniformity. I don't mean to claim either of these arguments are bulletproof, I justthink that a principle of "we shouldn't do anything that risksfragmentation of Geminispace" (which is obviously a good principle)necessarily comes down clearly on one side of this question or theother. Cheers,Solderpunk