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meff meff at meff.me
Fri Sep 11 20:09:33 BST 2020
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Gary Johnson <lambdatronic at disroot.org> writes:
However, I do want to throw in a counterpoint to recommending people
abandon Gemtext and serve up more Markdown or HTML in Geminispace.
While it is true that they can all be served up by the Gemini protocol,
it is not currently the case that very many Gemini clients can render
anything other than Gemtext. If enough people start to publish in
Markdown and/or HTML, we may soon find our experience of surfing
Geminispace to largely be about downloading Markdown and HTML pages
whenever we click on links and then having to open the local files in
our format-specific renderers of choice.
I see this largely as a feature, not a bug. HTML desired to be justthis, the de facto and de jure landing spot on the web. It's now becomea vehicle for everything: for applications hooking into a DocumentObject Model to modify state, for semantic markup, and for layout. Thishas also largely driven innovation into HTML away from other formats,because HTML is the format that everyone sees.
This does not sound like much fun to me, and it would impose a much
higher development cost on each browser developer as they would have to
implement rendering engines for Gemtext, Markdown, HTML, etc. in order
to provide their users with a more seamless browsing experience.
Lightweight markup formats like Markdown and ReST are readable withoutyour browser formatting anything. Lightweight clients can get away withnot parsing anything and dumping a set of MIME types directly to theuser (either on-screen, to stdout, or however the browser works). HTMLhas high quality parser implementations on various platforms in variouslanguages. XML also usually has good quality parsers available on mostplatforms/languages. HNGopher, a Hacker News Gopher mirror, uses w3m torender HTML content into plain text. Nothing is stopping Gemini browsersfrom shelling out to w3m on platforms that have it available andrendering content this way.
- meff