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Optional/mandatory whitespace in §5.5 Advanced line types

Nathan Galt mailinglists at ngalt.com

Sun Sep 13 03:46:12 BST 2020

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Prior reading:

=

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html The Spec, §5.5 Advanced line types

I noticed that the spec has three different advanced line types and three different whitespace handling verbiages for each.

Heading lines: Start with 1–3 “#”, then optional whitespace.List items: Start with “* “ (note the space!)Quote lines: Start with “

”

Shouldn’t these three have the same whitespace rules, with the same phrasing?

Here’s my argument for “mandatory whitespace for all” ([\t ]+):

- It lets authors write “#3. I like eggs.” without accidentally getting that line parsed as if it were a heading (we don’t have backslash escapes like Markdown does)- It’s better for some emoticons that, um, might be out there that start with

or *- “#Steak” looks like a hashtag, and I could see some fraction of authors writing “#blah” _meaning_ for it to be a tag- We shouldn’t be worried about backcompat at v0.14.2. I don’t have much gemini text, but I’m the sort who would reformat his own non-conformant documents to match something like this.

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I could see myself wanting an H4-equivalent or higher, but I’m not certain this is _quite_ the right time to mention it. Also the current spec already seems to say that clients should parse “#### Eggs” as not-a-heading.