💾 Archived View for carcosa.net › journal › 20190705-link-syntax.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:46:57. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
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People are weighing in on the new proposed link syntax for gemini map files.
Everyone seems to like the use of => on a new line to mark a link. The points of
discussion are 1. whether whitespace after '=>' is mandatory, and what kind of
whitesppace is allowed, and 2. whether the text or the URL comes first.
On question 1, I think whitespace is mandatory, but the amount and type of it
doesn't matter. Any combination of spaces, tabs, non-breaking spaces, etc. This
is a job where using a regular expression does not actually give you two
problems.
On question 2, there seems to be an emergind consensus that the URL should come
first. The main argument in favor seems to be that it is slightly easier to
parse; Tomasino makes a secondary argument that it makes it easier to guarantee
that the URL is visible. I want to strongly disagree with this position: the
human-readable text needs to come first. This is because the text document is
mainly supposed to be useful to a human, and secondarily to the program. Humans
should not have to read past the link URL, which may be long and weird, in order
to see the part that is meaningful to them. This is also consistent with
lightweight markup languages like MarkDown and MediaWiki.
I'm seeing a bit of a slowdown in Gemini discussion lately. It may be that it's
just that Solderpunk is on vacation, or it may be that there's not really that
much to discuss. But I'm not seeing people standing up servers, or progress on
the clients that are out there, either. I hope this doesn't represent a decline
in interest in the project.