💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 001403.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:54:25. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG
Sun Jun 7 21:10:49 BST 2020
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On Sun, Jun 07, 2020 at 09:38:04PM +0300, Frank LENORMAND wrote:
This amendment that prevents conflicts between list items and
*emphasised text* indirectly acknowledges that clients may not
render *emphasised text* verbatim.
Writers are no longer ensured by the standard that their text surrounded with
asterisks will not be decorated by the client, by extension.
Writers were *never* assured by the standard that text surrounded withasterisks would not be decorated by the client!
Clients that want to do that can, but it's strictly an optional extraout-of-spec nicety. If anybody wants to do this, the onus is on them todo is smartly enough that it doesn't interfere with the specced use ofasterisks for line items. If they mess that up, presumably their userswill move to an either less ambitious or better written client whichdoesn't mangle things.
Are there any plans to mention inline text decoration explicitly in the
specification? If yes, it follows that there should be a way for writers
to escape asterisks around words, in non pre-formatted blocks.
There aren't. Even if there were, it wouldn't follow that there wouldneed to be a way to escape them. The spec says "authors should not expectto exercise any control over the precise rendering of their text lines,only of their actual textual content". This extends to not being ableto opt out of various optional niceties that clients may choose toimplement above and beyond the spec.
Authors of text/gemini should never expect to influence the size,weight, colour, font, alignment etc. of any of their text. That's inthe client's hands, and that's a good thing. The advanced line typesthat exist may have common and semi-predictable consequences forstylisastion in extant clients, but the reason they are in there isprimarily to give some way to convey important *semantic* information.It's true that the list item type doesn't *quite* live up to that ideal.But I like pretty lists, so...
Cheers,Solderpunk