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Re: "My lizard brain keeps on thinking of ways to add formatting..."
@skyjake: I know there are drawbacks to this non-standard use (although I hadn’t thought about screen readers, which is easily the most troubling to me). Why filter them in Bubble though? Unless it’s just because it’s a particular gripe of yours, which honestly sounds like a good enough reason.
Jul 19 · 4 months ago
I would filter them because, as a matter of principle, Unicode characters should be used according to their semantic meaning and not their visual appearance.
The appearance may vary wildly on different devices and apps. Relying on any single visual appearance, the one that you're seeing, will cause some percentage of readers to be unable to decipher your message. The screen reader case is just the extreme example of this.
🚀 totroptof · Jul 19 at 17:28:
Right, but filtering those characters by deleting them would deny them any useful semantics. Filtering them by replacing them with lookalikes would only be a violation of the principle by assuming semantics from appearance.
As I said:
forcibly filtering them out in Bubble and replacing them with plain Latin characters.
The reasoning being that if you intended them to be used for visually styling italic and bold text, there's a higher likelihood of them being correctly presented for a given reader if they are just shown as the basic corresponding Latin letters.
That would be more difficult to apply to super/subscripts because those have other valid uses, namely footnotes. As a simple heuristic, one could check if a word consists of nothing but super or subcripts it's likely not a footnote.
Software can't read the poster's mind, so it won't be perfect in all cases, but that's not the goal. It just needs to disincentivize the "bad" behavior while improving the outcome on average.
🚀 totroptof · Jul 19 at 18:03:
@gyaradong: There might be validity to the notion that a lot of formatting can be a crutch for poor writing, but emphasis should be placed on the “can be” (it would have been much easier to communicate this succinctly with some way to typeset emphasis!). I suspect that if we take it as a rule that use of typeset emphasis is a marker of poor-quality writing then the pool of quality English literature would shrink considerably. I think the use of italics for emphasis is a pretty entrenched feature of standard English at this point (AFAIK more so than the use of all-caps to convey shouting), and it absolutely was a part of my English education.
I had a whole further spiel here, but it was long and rambly and I wasn’t sure how committed I was to defending my points from counter-argument, so I just want to say this: I think tools for expression are good. Obviously not all tools for expression have the same engineering trade-offs, which strikes me as the central question wrt emphasis in Gemtext. Allowing expression to be dictated by strict necessity (re YAGNI) sounds pretty bleak, and similarly wrt personal taste.
🐉 gyaradong · Jul 20 at 22:00:
I was really reflecting on my own overuse of emphasis, but overall I regret saying it is a crutch. Having said that, I do stand by YAGNI for the simple reason that most handwriting has no way to represent emphasis but it has been a fine way to communicate.
Also, I'm a fan of the minimal set of features to do a thing. That's why I like gemini. I'm not saying emphasis is bloat but a "why not" attitude to features might get us to bloat.
🐵 cquenelle · Jul 21 at 03:38:
My gut says to look to print books as precedent. I would favor using * for “emphasis” (typography unspecified). Then stop there.
In hand written text I think underline for emphasis is common?
"No, _you_ do the dishes." definitely works ;)
It occurred to me that eith "unspecified emphasis" clients could use the language in the response metadata; italics for English, maybe bold or underline for other languages.
My lizard brain keeps on thinking of ways to add formatting such as emphasis or underlines to gemtext. I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of this formatting is a crutch for good writing, and only really exists in an ad hoc sense due to the digital publishing revolution. Some guy just invented bold italic underline and we've been just putting them everywhere since. Just like all caps is possible but has no taste, so is text formatting.