💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 000316.gmi captured on 2020-10-31 at 01:29:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Text reflow woes (or: I want bullets back!)y

Michael Lazar lazar.michael22 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 15 05:03:28 GMT 2020
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On Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 1:43 PM solderpunk <solderpunk at sdf.org> wrote:
>
> Okay, I have started to re-engage with this endless discussion -
> slowly and, I have to admit, reluctantly.  When I think about how many
> details there are to consider here, how many different options we have
> to choose among, and how absolutely incredible the power-to-weight
> ratio is of verbatim fixed-width text with a predefined width (I
> mean, really, you can:
>
> Left align text,
>                              center text,
>                                                  even right align text
>
> without the client having to even know what those things are!), it's
> incredibly tempting to echo the "reflowed text be damned!" sentiment
> recently expressed at mozz.us[1] and spec 40 character fixed text and
> just move on.

For what it's worth, I have been tryingout the 40-character width thing for awhile now and I'm really enjoying it! Iactually find it a lot more pleasant totype vs 80 character lines. I don't knowif it's because my eyes don't need tojump as far, or because it takes fewerkeystrokes to move my cursor to themiddle of a line... Something about itjust *feels* good to type.

Not to mention, pages like this [1]display perfectly on my iphone using agemini-http proxy server. Regardless ofwhether you choose to adopt the ```mode, you're still going to need torecommend a line length for authors tohard wrap their text/gemini files at.And I suggest that 40 is still worthconsidering for this.

> Gopher is better than the current Gemini spec in this regard, because
> you can put gophermap lines in an item type 0 text file no problem and
> they'll just be displayed as-is.  But copying and pasting that
> gophermap is not guaranteed to go smoothly.  With terminal-based
> applications, the tabs would stand a good chance of being transformed
> into consecutive spaces, which would actually break them.  Let's be
> better than that!  Let's make it possible to display, copy and paste
> Gemini links inside of Gemini documents, to facilitate teaching and
> talking about Gemini over Gemini.  It seems quite natural that this
> should be possible.
>
> Even if text/gemini were specced at 40 fixed-width characters with no
> reflow, meeting this goal would require some syntax comparable to
> <pre> tags in HTML, to switch off processing of Gemini links.  If
> we're going to have that anyway, we may as well have reflowed text be
> the default and this <pre> syntax can do double duty by also enabling
> non-reflowed text for source code, poetry, etc.

Here are some other alternatives thatmight be worth considering. I do thinkthat displaying gemini links is a validuse-case, but adding a whole newpreformatted text mode only for thisnarrow case feels a bit heavy-handed tome. Granted, I realize there are otherbenefits to the preformatted mode thathave already been outlined.

Option 1. Use a no-op link

Pick a URL that by convention doesn'tlead anywhere useful, and then hijackthe (link friendly name) portion todisplay your gemini link.

=
># =
>/about.txt About

"#" is a valid relative URL, right?Somebody else on this list *cough* seanmight be able to some up with somethingbetter. This would be displayed onmost gemini clients as:

=
>/about.txt About

The line would be highlighted as a link(unless clients choose to handle thisspecial case), but otherwise it shouldwork without any changes to the spec.

Option 2. Use text/plain

For the narrow use-case where you wantto show off some examples of geminilinks, stick those links in a separatetext/plain document. Or just serve yourwhole page as text/plain. The examplelinks can't intermingle with real geminilinks in the same document, but is thatreally such a big deal?

How you feel about this option likelydepends on which side of the fence youfall on regarding text/gemini usage.Should text/gemini be used like HTML ison the web, with most content beingwritten as gemini files? Or should it bemore like gopher, where directories aretype text/gemini but many people writetheir blog posts and other leafdocuments as text/plain.

Lately I have been leaning more towardsthe second interpretation. Take anotherexample: Instead of writing a pythoncode snippet inline in a text/geminidocument, what if you instead added alink to your code snippet and served itas "text/x-python"? This feels naturalto me given that other media contentlike images also can't be displayedinline.

[1] https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mozz.us/diagnostics/2020-01-08/notes.gmi

- mozz