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A proposed scheme for parsing preformatted alt text

Kevin Sangeelee kevin at susa.net

Mon Sep 7 10:06:23 BST 2020

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Since my services have been retained by the Devil himself, I am obliged toadvocate on his behalf as follows:

Anything that adds text that's really only parseable by a machine is just ateeny bit user-hostile.

The ideas being discussed go further, because (unless I misunderstand) itencourages text in weird unaligned formats to be served up by default.

I would argue (on behalf of the Devil, of course) that mono-spacedpreformatted text is already perfect for aligning user-readable tables.It's just awkward for machines to process semantically. There are howeverreasonably reliable heuristics to figure out columns, should the clientwant to add decoration. etc.

Perhaps the alt-text could be used to specify something like 'source:/data/my_original.csv', to give a person-readable route to machine-readabledata that the client could use to fetch and render in-place on behalf ofthe user.

Kevin

On Mon, 7 Sep 2020 at 00:21, Luke Emmet <luke at marmaladefoo.com> wrote:

Hi All

We had an interesting discussion on the #Gemini IRC channel earlier

today about a generalised scheme for parsing the alt text on

preformatted regions, e.g.

```this is the alt text, not normally displayed to the end user

the preformatted content

```

It was a collective discussion, but I've written up some of the key

points in a post here:

gemini://

gemini.marmaladefoo.com/blog/7-Sep-2020_Parsing_preformatted_alt_text.gmi

Essentially the key design considerations are as follows:

1. By default the whole alt text can be used as a label (current behaviour)

2. Use CSS style syntax for the remainder, a familiar and low ritual syntax

3. Don't prescribe the attributes, allow practice to suggest them

4. Be backwards compatible and friendly to screen readers etc.

two initial attributes seem to have obvious initial utility and could be

used to effectively label content in a practical way:

content-type

lang

Best Wishes

- Luke

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