💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 000728.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 02:22:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG
Sun May 17 09:40:04 BST 2020
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ``` On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 02:55:25AM +0430, Ben wrote: > Or maybe Gemini should support in-line links of its own? It's already got > some markdown elements in other aspects of page formatting. I'm really not keen on adding in-line links. It would significantlyincrease the effort involved in parsing text/gemini documents - insteadof peeking at the first 3 characters of a line and then being able tohandle it, every line has to be split up into words and each word testedindividually. Yes, there are e.g. Markdown libraries out there which will do this, butthey're only usable if we adopt Markdown wholesale, which brings in awhole load of other problems. Not to mention that almost none of thoselibraries do anything other than convert to HTML, etc.). The current text/gemini definition was very carefully and painstakinglyarrived at after a lot of discussion. I'm not saying it's perfect, butI think any future changes to it will be very minor, and something likea switch to in-line links is pretty well off-the-table at this point. I acknowledge that when you are used to being able to link in-line, notbeing able to feels weird and different and like you are forced intoclunky ways of formatting your text. But the one-line-per-link formathas real advantages, aside from extreme simplicity of parsing ofpresentation. It makes links extremely easy to find, and it encouragesneat, well-organised layout where links are put into related lists. Itworks very well in particular for "landing pages" - text/gemini as awhole does, actually - the combination of headers, subheaders andsub-subheaders via #, ## and ###, with one-line-per-link, stronglyencourages you to structure your site neatly and to layout the entirestructure on the front page so that navigation is an absolute breeze.Chalk and cheese, when compared to modern websites. For content it doesn't always work as well, but before deciding that itjust cannot work I propose we make a concerted effort to develop newwriting habits/conventions which work with it as well as possible. Cheers,Solderpunk