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Writing emails in text/gemini?

Aaron Janse <aaron (a) ajanse.me>

I love that Gemini recommends writing long lines and letting the client 
wrap text. However, it seems like this mailing list is still being written 
in plaintext hard-wrapped at 80-columns. This makes reading the mailing 
list difficult on mobile.

Is there opposition to letting people here format their emails in 
text/gemini (i.e. long lines)?

P.S. I've been subscribed for a while, but I can't find the answer by 
searching the mailing list messages I've received: what happened to block 
quote syntax in text/gemini?

~ Aaron

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solderpunk <solderpunk (a) SDF.ORG>

On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 10:23:54PM -0700, Aaron Janse wrote:
 
> Is there opposition to letting people here format their emails in 
text/gemini (i.e. long lines)?

I don't think this is a good idea.  No email client is going to
recognise text/gemini (famous last words!) which means for most people
(okay, I don't have hard data, but I'm *assuming* most people aren't
reading the list on a mobile device) this will just result in a much
reduced user experience.

Once rawtext.club is back up you should at least be able to follow the
discussion (read-only) via text/gemini!

> P.S. I've been subscribed for a while, but I can't find the answer by 
searching the mailing list messages I've received: what happened to block 
quote syntax in text/gemini?
 
I think the person/people who was/were really pushing hard for this were
really invested in a relatively complicated form of it which was
infinitely nestable, so it could be used to represent e.g. deep comment
threads, and I wasn't super keen on that idea.

As a purely optional line-type with no special semantics, acting just as
a styling hint, the way unordered item lists are currently implemented,
I think I'm actually fairly unopposed to adding this.

Of course it would, like everything else, be strictly line-based, so
quoting multi-paragraph content might not format the way people
expect...

Cheers,
Solderpunk

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Aaron Janse <aaron (a) ajanse.me>

> I think the person/people who was/were really pushing hard for this were
> really invested in a relatively complicated form of it which was
> infinitely nestable, so it could be used to represent e.g. deep comment
> threads, and I wasn't super keen on that idea.

Hehe, that person was me. Yep, I've been thinking about it more, and I
agree with you. I think it would be just fine to have comments without
nesting. Going out of our way to support deep comment threads would
help proxies while distracting from the high-value, original content
that attracts people (or at least me) to gopher & gemini in the frst
place.

> As a purely optional line-type with no special semantics, acting just as
> a styling hint, the way unordered item lists are currently implemented,
> I think I'm actually fairly unopposed to adding this.

Yay!

> Of course it would, like everything else, be strictly line-based, so
> quoting multi-paragraph content might not format the way people
> expect...

Hmm, we could just use multiple quotes, right? One per paragraph?

~ Aaron

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Aaron Janse <aaron (a) ajanse.me>

> I don't think this is a good idea.  No email client is going to
> recognise text/gemini (famous last words!) which means for most people
> (okay, I don't have hard data, but I'm *assuming* most people aren't
> reading the list on a mobile device) this will just result in a much
> reduced user experience.

Oh, I meant to suggest we, as a community, write text/gemini while marking
it as text/plain. But yeah, apparently some email clients still don't
know how to wrap text at a reasonable width? But last time I checked, this
is a flamewar topic.

~ Aaron

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