💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › s › Gemini › 441 captured on 2023-06-16 at 17:01:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-06-14)
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It's a popular convention in geminispace to use an emoji as the first character of a link line description. It's a fun way to give some flair to your capsule in the absence of images and styling. The popularity has no doubt been boosted by Lagrange, which has special handling to shift these emojis into the left gutter. But I can remember capsules doing this going back to basically the beginning of gemini. I first saw it on yam655's capsule which inspired me to add them to astrobotany.
I just pushed an update to my gemini proxy to make these links look nicer, because the emojis look pretty bad when underlined as a hyperlink.
So my question is, should this convention be elevated to a more formal spec or implementation guide?
2023-05-18 · 4 weeks ago
Generally speaking, I think the Gemini Best Practices document should be periodically updated according to the common conventions of the community, both in a positive or negative sense of what works and what doesn't.
When it comes to Emoji link icons, they have a clear usability benefit as they make the meaning of the links easier to understand and the links faster to scan. IMO, this should be mentioned in Best Practices, although how exactly a client should render the Emoji is up to the link presentation style.
Some guidelines I can think of:
Ah ha, so that's how that works :)
@skyjake I don't believe that links are easier to scan in all cases, if they have icons at the beginning. There are four reasons:
@michaelnordmeyer It's fair to call out the downsides, but also it doesn't have to be a perfect solution in order to be generally useful. The benefit of an implementation guide is that these pitfalls can be called out to help people avoid them.
And Microsoft 2000 was the pinnacle of GUI design!
Treating the emojis semantically would open up a TON of interesting possibilities for client hints, and act as an equivalent to gopher's selector type.
— This link will open a short input prompt
— 📝 This link will open an long input prompt, and should use a textarea widget
— 🔑 This link will open a secret input prompt
— 🖼 This link will open an image that can be displayed inline
@mozz Such semantic hints would be a nice thing to have to enhance the user experience, but it would also make it more difficult to write appropriately formatted links. For example, on platforms that have no easy symbol/Emoji insertion UI you might be forced to awkwardly copy and paste such characters from somewhere.
I'm really strongly in favor of semantic use as that will ensure this convention remains a positive one for screen readers.
@skyjake That's true, I sometimes take my mac keyboard for granted with the built-in emoji picker.
2023-05-19 · 4 weeks ago
