💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 001195.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 02:03:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Sean Conner sean at conman.org
Sat May 30 03:41:37 BST 2020
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It was thus said that the Great poomklao at yahoo.com once stated:
I have a couple of silly ideas for extra formatting:
# Images
Elegant form:
IMG /static/fun.png "Alt text to display if you're in a terminal"
Backwards-compatible form:
=
image:/static/fun.png "Image: My cute little cat"
I'm picking this message as a starting point. I'm not trying to shamepoomklao for this idea, as people have been wanting something like this foryears [1]. And I promised an email about this earlier to day, when I said:
NO INLINING OF LINKS ALLOWED
and here is the rational I have for this.
The idea is technically called "transclusion" and was coined by TedNelson. "Transclusion" is the automatic inclusion of content into onedocument from another one and was meant as a means of presenting a quote(<blockquote> in HTML) from a particular version of a particular document(with royalties and all that mess). We have a very limited form of it onthe Web---the only three mediums that can be directly transcluded areimages, video and sounds, none of which support transclusion themselves. You also have a limited from with frames in HTML, but ...
Like all formal, well specified systems, things tend to go pear shaped [2]when you allow self-referential references, and that's what transclusion (ingeneral) brings to the table. In the Hacker News thread about Gemini [4], aperson brought up transclusion [5] in text/gemini files with the followingsyntax:
<= gemini://example.com/path/to/resource
and for the sake of argument, let's assume this does what itindicates---that the document at the given link is inserted at that pointinto the document being rendered [6]. For the example, let's say we areobtaining the document <gemini://example.com/document.gemini>, and in thatdocument you have:
<= gemini://example.com/document.gemini
And thus the problem is revealed.
"But surely, you can keep track of all transcluded files to prevent thisfrom happening," you say. And yes, that is possible. But as the creator ofthe Client Torture Test, I can assure you that I can create an endlessstream of unique documents that transclude an endless stream of uniquedocuments that transclude an endless stream of unique documents thattransclude an endless stream of unique documents th
Core error-bus dumped.
Where was I?
Oh yes, self-referential transclusion, or an infinite amount oftransclusion.
"But surely, like rediection, you can limit the depth of transclusion,"you say. Yes, you can limit the level of transclusion, but that just addsto the complexity of the implementation. An implementation would have toboth track the documents being transcluded plus the depth of transclusion.Unlike rediects, where you just track the number of times you are beingredirected, transclusion is a bit more complex:
doc1 <= doc2 <= doc3 <= doc4 <= doc5 <= doc6 <= doc7 <= doc8 <= doc9 <= doc10 <= doc11 <= doc12 <= doc13
Just limited the depth of transclusion to 5 levels still leads to apotential 626 documents being transcluded (if I did my math correctly). Andimplementing just one level is annoying for little in return.
So while I like the idea of transclusion, I have to admit there are issueswhen you can possibly transclude documents that transclude other documents.So in this, I say:
NO INLINING OF LINKS ALLOWED!
-spc
[1] Starting in the 60s, with Ted Nelson and his Xanadu project.
[2] English (perhaps an Americanism) for "Situation Normal All Fouled Up" [3]
[3] aka SNAFU. [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23046008
[6] In the Hacker News comment, the transclusion is meant to be done by the server, not the client. For my argument, it doesn't make a difference *who* does the translusion.