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A Gemini-style proposal

Byron Torres b at torresjrjr.com

Wed Nov 3 10:40:37 GMT 2021

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3 Nov 2021 09:23:33 Charles Iliya Krempeaux <cikrempeaux at gmail.com>:

I know — but I think there is a tendency for semantic elements to eventually become (defacto) style elements.

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The sense I have of this is —

Regular people don't care whether these were originally for mathematics or not — they look like bold versions of characters. And a number of people are already using them as such. (There are even online tools to help people use them.)

If Unicode doesn't come up with a semantically “pure” convention for bolding — people will just use these.

That's the kind of attitude that made HTML thesemantic/presentational spaghetti it istoday. We ought to separate semantics frompresentation where possible.

And it isn't like we haven't been through this before.

Back in the day when terminals were common, some of them extended the set of control codes (beyond those that came with the character set), to include bolding.

For example —

\e[1m

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Isn't that a counter example?Control characters are not printable characters.

Also —

We (in this community) are doing semantically “impure” things too.

Unicode has more than one symbol for making bullet lists —

For example U+2022 “•”.

Yet when we write Gemtext we use the asterisk (U+002A “*”) for the bullet in the bullet list item.

And I know this didn't start with Gemtext, and it is an old convention. But we are continuing it.

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And yes, I know, not everyone's keyboards can easily generate U+2022. But some people's can. Mine can. And (if that is a concern) U+2022 could have been a permitted Gemtext bullet list symbol (in addition to the asterisk).

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If Gemtext can ignore the original semantics of the asterisk, the back-tick, the pound symbol, the equal symbol, and the greater-than symbol — then why can't we also do the same with those mathematical characters?

Gentext is a markup language. It's notsupposed to be an exact one-to-onecorrelation to the resulting presentation.The characters each have a purpose in theGemtext context. The mathematical charactersare mathematical, in whatever context.

We, as you touched upon, use '*' because itsASCII, which is the most universal characterset and therefore accessible for everyone.It would not be smart to include Unicode coresyntax. That's why most programminglanguages' core syntaxes use ASCII.Otherwise, we'd all be writing in APL-likelanguages.