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[SPECS text/gemini] Heading lines proposal

Sean Conner sean at conman.org

Fri Jul 24 01:44:28 BST 2020

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It was thus said that the Great Mad Ogrit once stated:

Requiring a space for structural formatting seems wise. I don't believe the
proposal implied that navigational formatting (=
) would require one.
But regarding quotes, although the
prefix may be visually familiar from
text threads its use is inconsistent at best with regard to space before or
after. Requiring a space will definitely break multiply-nested multi-line
things (or make them redundant).

The gemtext spec doesn't allow nesting at all, so multply-nestedmulti-line things are already a problem (as I found out when trying toconvert HTML to gemtext).

Which brings me to... If quotes are only meant for a single depth, but
represent semantic rather than structural formatting (sourced content,
could reasonably have an author or other meaningful attribution), would it
make more sense to treat them like preformatted lines (line toggled) and
retire the prefix entirely?

No. My blog (phlog, gemlog) makes extensive use of both <BLOCKQUOTE> and<PRE> tags. For instance this post from last year:

gemini://gemini.conman.org/2019/03/31.1

In the originial HTML (http://boston.conman.org/2019/03/31.1), the format issomething long the lines of:

<BLOCKQUOTE

<P>...</P>

<P>...</P>

</BLOCKQUOTE

<P

...</P>

<PRE

...</PRE>

<P

...</P>

And while I had to go back quite a bit to find an entry with both ablockquote and preformatted text, I do use blockquotes and preformatted textquite often, and they have different semantic meanings.

That post, by the way, shows how I deal with ordered lists in HTML (whengemtext only supports a type of unordered list).

* Quoted content when visually distinct has more in common with
preformatted content in that, while it can be wrapped and flowed, you're
often quoting something by copy-pasting at which point the original layout
can be relevant

True. Trying to quote preformatted text is not easy with gemtext. That'sone of the reasons I still prefer HTML (which Gemini *can* serve, by theway).

-spc