💾 Archived View for gemini.bunburya.eu › newsgroups › gemini › messages › ssk1fd$4lj$1@dont-email.me… captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:53:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Luca Saiu <luca@ageinghacker.net>
Subject: Re: Simple conversions from HTML to simple markups are disappointing
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2022 17:58:18 +0100
Message-ID: <ssk1fd$4lj$1@dont-email.me>
Hello bunburya.
On 2022-01-23 at 14:03 +0000, bunburya wrote:
In principle, markdown -> gemtext suffers from the same issues as HTML
-> gemtext (loss of information due to moving to a format with fewer
supported features), but much less information is lost as markdown is
much closer to gemtext to begin with.
Agreed.
I'm guessing the main thing you are missing in gemtext is inline links.
To me the lack of control on preformatted text is more serious than the
lack of inline links, possibly because of the technical topics I
normally write about.
Not being able to display source code clearly is a fatal flaw for me;
and notice how Gopher is less flawed than Gemini in this sense, by
virtue of being less abstract.
I do not particularly mind non-inline links; in fact they may promote a
clear style. However numbered footnote-style links obtained by
conversion, without descriptive labels, are difficult to follow without
interrupting the flow of reading: see the end of my conversion example,
which I believe is representative in terms of clutter.
gemini://ageinghacker.net/test-conversion.gmi
One has to write, from the beginning, in the new “minimal markup” style.
Incidentally I am not saying that Gemini is perfect. In fact I miss a
comment syntax, which I would use to encode my own information
(examples: list of keywords, tags, priority in a site-wide page map).
But what I am thinking is a set of semantic extensions, the kind which
Gemini is designed to prevent; that is fair.
In the same way I also miss italic and bold -- call them “emphasis” if
you will -- but here it might be healthy to let them go altogether.
Part of this entire exercise is detoxing from the overabundance of
irrelevant information. For decades I have been planning never to use
smileys again and write text a dignified style, with meaning conveyed
through words instead of some flashy semi-literate replacement for them.
In the end once in a while laziness wins.
The more I consider the issue the more I lean towards defining my own
source format from which to machine-generate even simple formats like
Gemini. In the longer term it would be something powerful and
extensible, like M4 without the awful quoting mechanism. For the time
being it can be a trivial system.
I would keep my public site source tree, with markup files identified by
a specific extension linking each other, along with data files such as
images. A script would generate copies of the entire tree, with
symbolic links where appropriate, with notes translated into Gemini,
Gopher or HTML.
If I get to write this tool and make it even vaguely usable by others I
will announce it here.
How do you, and other people here, solve the problem? Do you write
sites accessible only to Gemini or only to Gopher?
Thanks for the conversation.
--
Luca Saiu -- http://ageinghacker.net
I support everyone's freedom of mocking any opinion or belief, no
matter how deeply held, with open disrespect and the same unrelented
enthusiasm of a toddler who has just learned the word "poo".
Parent:
Start of thread:
Children: