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Nathan Galt mailinglists at ngalt.com
Mon Sep 20 01:32:04 BST 2021
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On Sep 19, 2021, at 1:43 AM, raingloom <raingloom at riseup.net> wrote:
On Sun, 12 Sep 2021 18:14:07 +0000
mntn at mntn.xyz wrote:
The Gemtext spec would seem to have no problem with this, as the
first line is considered "alt text" and it is up to the client to
determine both what should be done with it and how it should affect
the presentation. But I wanted to put this out there to get a broader
perspective.
That's not what alt text is. It's for screen readers. A bunch of people
are way into ASCII art so alt text is needed. They are image
descriptions.
I recommend the following instead:
Just name the language on the line before the <pre> block.
ie.:
lua:
```
local function whatever() end
```
This way you aren't making an accessibility feature worse by trying to
overload it to be some generic metadata container.
Someone floated the idea of using the leading ``` line for alt text and the trailing ``` line for language colorization (or maybe the reverse). It sounded like a good idea to me, but the current maintainer of the Gemini spec (not unreasonably) has a try-it-first-and-report-back attitude to these sorts of things and, as far as I can tell, nobody’s modified a Gemini browser to try this sort of thing out.
I use the leading ``` for both types of preformatted blocks and I’d be happy to change my capsule to use this sort of bifurcated thing, but I wouldn’t know what to try out first. My hunch is that moving the language-colorization text to the final position is the winning play, but that’s the option that goes directly counter to preexisting (Markdown) practice/habit/muscle memory, so it’s liable to be the sort of thing that’s screwed up more often (people typing colorizer hints where alt text should go).