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Documents with mixed languages

Nathan Galt mailinglists at ngalt.com

Mon Dec 13 18:59:40 GMT 2021

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On Dec 13, 2021, at 9:28 AM, Luke Emmet <luke at marmaladefoo.com> wrote:

Hello

On 11-Dec-2021 12:00, Wolf wrote:

And I think I've notice a missing thing in

text/gemini format. In particular regarding documents with content

composed from multiple languages. The specification provides this

example:

"text/gemini; lang=en,fr"

Denotes a text/gemini document written in a mixture of English and

French

However, that seems to be a document-wide settings. If I wanted a

document to have a mix of Japanese and Chinese, I believe it would be:

"text/gemini; lang=ja,zh"

However, that in itself is not very useful. What I think is missing is

an ability to set language for a specific part of the document itself.

I'm not sure if the spec is permanently frozen or can still be extended,

but I would like to propose adding a language toggle command to

text/gemini.

Yes there are lots of modes of communication that Gemtext is not perfect for. Tabular data, inline formatting, etc.

You are not limited to only serving gemtext over gemini, you can serve other media types such as HTML, PDF, ODF etc, which may be better suited to this particular desire than gemtext which is - as plain to see and by design - quite basic. Those might be better for your use case. For non-gemtext pages, clients will usually provide an option to save locally or to open other media types in the associated application allowing the content to be viewed.

Regards

- Luke

On the other hand, if you foresee yourself frequently adding tables or complicated formatting or mixed-language pages, you and your readers will probably be much better served if you set up a website with some sensible, lightweight CSS style rules and almost certainly no JavaScript.

I have a couple things I’ve written that’re languishing in the hopper, but I’ll probably never publish them on Gemini because they have too many semi-complicated tables in them.

I’m a big fan of Gemini’s current feature set and its lack of extensibility, but my hunch is that if you’ve never been bitten by the lack of any features that HTTP+HTML has, you haven’t used Gemini much.