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Mad Ogrit madogrit0 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 24 15:14:17 BST 2020
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On Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 8:44 PM Sean Conner <sean at conman.org> wrote:
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-nested
multi-line things are already a problem (as I found out when trying to
convert HTML to gemtext).
Right, so unless I'm willing to manually clean up copy-pasted material Iend up with a bunch of individual lines treated as quote lines that thenalso contain superfluous text like
,
, and
|
|.
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:
Sorry, I think I was being imprecise. I wasn't proposing to not supportquotes as a separate concept from pre, but rather add an additional linetoggle, eg ___ or something unlikely to appear in nominal plaintext, whichwould be handled in the same manner as pre - a toggle for blockquote,allowing for things like:
So I tried```lang=gofunc primes ()...```But Hofstadter's paper said___src=gemini://princip.ia/hoff.gmi?335Remember to add a terminal case like```lang=pythondef isPrime()...```___
(The src= is just a silly example and definitely serves a different purposethan lang=)
Of course, you made me realize this would significantly complicate thetoggle approach in the case of unmatched toggles overlapping and theinevitable nesting of alternating toggles.
Come to think of it, I assume that pasting gemtext containing pre inside ofpre toggles would still require some manual editing, for instance to addwhite space before the embedded pre. I'm guessing this is why nesting ofany kind is not supported :-)
I haven't fully grokked the archives yet so this may have already beendiscussed.
True. Trying to quote preformatted text is not easy with gemtext.
That's
one of the reasons I still prefer HTML (which Gemini *can* serve, by the
way)
My hope with supporting and popularizing gemtext is specifically tocounteract the ways in which HTML has become very easy to make veryinaccessible - even just the semantics of layout and flow. I'm in it tomake and support an accessible client with font sizes I can read /screen-read no matter what the content is :)
Even markdown, as many things do, has become just this side of easy to makehard to read and hard to make easy to edit and copy paste universally, so Ido really value the notion of an intrinsic format that is easy tounderstand and reliably forward only parse-able.
I originally felt the line toggle approach seemed like an odd burden on theclient given the simplicity and line orientedness of the rest of theformat, but I recognize it has the benefit of not requiring an an author totouch up content, reducing the barrier to entry of copy paste or generallyincluding things that are otherwise hard to reformat (eg turn a funky tableinto tsv and dump it in pre).
Obviously, the above silly example could just be decomposed into a singlequote line, a single pre-block, and a link. But doing that requires theperson composing this text to think about and do that decompositionpossibly from text that they are simply copy pasting an existing pre-blockin existing gemtext.-------------- next part --------------An HTML attachment was scrubbed...URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20200724/5993b2de/attachment.htm>