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I vote we leave it alone. I had all these ideas when I saw it, too, but
it's really just fine as it is. As others have said, gemtext isn't the
only doc format if it doesn't work for you. But for what it does, I think
the design arguments ended up in a totally sweet spot for writing gemtext pages by hand.
On November 9, 2020 6:30:02 PM PST, gemini-request at lists.orbitalfox.eu wrote:
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>Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics
> (Sean Conner)
> 2. Escaping in gemtext (Ryan Westlund)
> 3. Re: more juicy gemini content to marinate your brain (Zach ??)
> 4. Re: Escaping in gemtext (Ali Fardan)
> 5. Re: Escaping in gemtext (Sean Conner)
> 6. Re: Escaping in gemtext (acdw)
> 7. Re: Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics
> (Katarina Eriksson)
> 8. Re: examples with Sympy (Zach DeCook)
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Message: 1
>Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2020 19:59:57 -0500
>From: Sean Conner <sean at conman.org>
>To: Gemini application layer protocol <gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu>
>Subject: Re: Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics
>Message-ID: <20201110005957.GO30302 at brevard.conman.org>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>It was thus said that the Great John Cowan once stated:
>>
>> Contexts where that doesn't work, from WP (and yes, I'm being
>pedantic):
>>
>> 1) Titles of books, movies, magazines, and other stand-alone works.
>>
>> 2) Scientific names of plants and animals.
>>
>> 3) Terms being introduced for the first time.
>>
>> 4) In narrative, the thoughts of a character.
>>
>> 5) Words being used as examples of themselves. ("The word _the_ is a
>> definite article.")
>>
>> 6) Names of ships.
>
>7) Foreign words
>
>8) Direct thoughts---example: _Is a gom jabbar something of Arrakis I
>must
> know before I go there?_ he wondered.
>
> -spc (The example is from Dune, of which about a third is the direct
> thoughts of the characters ... )
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 2
>Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2020 20:38:08 -0500
>From: Ryan Westlund <rlwestlund at gmail.com>
>To: gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu
>Subject: Escaping in gemtext
>Message-ID:
> <CAKSVUB+k7UTkO7Gz0USBfzL_vdj3Vv+tt7WcuSemGNu+xukxqw at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
>According to the Gemtext specification, any line that starts with
>"```" is a preformatting toggle. This makes it impossible to have such
>a line as part of a preformatted block. I understand the design goals
>of Gemtext, but I believe the Markdown solution to the same problem
>can be lifted straight into Gemtext relatively easily: allow more than
>3 backticks to open a preformatted block, and require the same number
>to close it as the number that opened it. This way, any possible text
>can be included in a preformatted block. Thoughts?
>
>The same issue exists with text lines (it's impossible to display "=>"
>or "#" at the beginning of a line of text), but I'm not concerned
>about that because having to prefix such lines with a space is not a
>big deal for plain text, whereas it is for code.
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 3
>Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2020 17:54:07 -0800
>From: Zach ?? <zach at anemon.es>
>To: Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net>
>Cc: gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu
>Subject: Re: more juicy gemini content to marinate your brain
>Message-ID: <768C829C-CEBB-4FEA-9925-D9739111AD04 at anemon.es>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
>
>> This is good content, but is it a mirror of a web site? I caught a
>> 'home' link on one of the pages that tried to send me to an http
>link.
>
>Yup! My e-worm friends aren?t technical enough to use gemini, so they
>(and our many friends who keep tabs on e-worm) access it through http.
>Sorry if that?s a faux pas in this community. Though to be fair,
>outside of a few form elements that you?ll never even see, the http
>site is basically the same as accessing the gemini site through a web
>portal.
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 4
>Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 05:03:30 +0300
>From: Ali Fardan <raiz at stellarbound.space>
>To: Ryan Westlund <rlwestlund at gmail.com>
>Cc: Gemini application layer protocol <gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu>
>Subject: Re: Escaping in gemtext
>Message-ID: <20201110050330.4877d47d at home>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
>On Mon, 9 Nov 2020 20:38:08 -0500
>Ryan Westlund <rlwestlund at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> According to the Gemtext specification, any line that starts with
>> "```" is a preformatting toggle. This makes it impossible to have
>such
>> a line as part of a preformatted block. I understand the design goals
>> of Gemtext, but I believe the Markdown solution to the same problem
>> can be lifted straight into Gemtext relatively easily: allow more
>than
>> 3 backticks to open a preformatted block, and require the same number
>> to close it as the number that opened it. This way, any possible text
>> can be included in a preformatted block. Thoughts?
>
>No, I don't like that idea.
>
>> The same issue exists with text lines (it's impossible to display
>"=>"
>> or "#" at the beginning of a line of text), but I'm not concerned
>> about that because having to prefix such lines with a space is not a
>> big deal for plain text, whereas it is for code.
>
>I have suggested this in IRC as I've considered that someone might have
>use for this, I agree with your argument, and since gemtext processing
>happens only by reading the first few bytes of each line, it is
>possible to introduce a new line format that is '\' which is escaped
>line, where it discards line formatting that is based on the first few
>characters so
>
>> \=> this is escaped
>
>will print
>
>> => this is escaped
>
>also keep in mind that '\' does not only escape the character after it,
>it disables line formatting, because in the example above, if '=' is
>escaped, '>' is right after it and can be interpreted as a quote.
>
>Now, even pre-formatted text toggle characters can be escaped by adding
>a rule in your parser to consider '\```' within a pre-formatted text
>block and translate it to literal '```'.
>
>Anyone else who might find my suggestion unappealing or have a better
>idea, feel free to share, I think this is a flaw with the gemtext
>document format not to have a way to escape certain characters to
>disable them from being interpreted mistakenly, all other formats do
>have a mechanism for doing this.
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 5
>Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2020 21:08:34 -0500
>From: Sean Conner <sean at conman.org>
>To: Gemini application layer protocol <gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu>
>Subject: Re: Escaping in gemtext
>Message-ID: <20201110020833.GP30302 at brevard.conman.org>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>It was thus said that the Great Ryan Westlund once stated:
>> According to the Gemtext specification, any line that starts with
>> "```" is a preformatting toggle. This makes it impossible to have
>such
>> a line as part of a preformatted block. I understand the design goals
>> of Gemtext, but I believe the Markdown solution to the same problem
>> can be lifted straight into Gemtext relatively easily: allow more
>than
>> 3 backticks to open a preformatted block, and require the same number
>> to close it as the number that opened it. This way, any possible text
>> can be included in a preformatted block. Thoughts?
>>
>> The same issue exists with text lines (it's impossible to display
>"=>"
>> or "#" at the beginning of a line of text), but I'm not concerned
>> about that because having to prefix such lines with a space is not a
>> big deal for plain text, whereas it is for code.
>
> I was about to recommend the zero-width space, and I even created a
>document for this:
>
> gemini://gemini.conman.org/test/escape.gemini
>
>but I did notice that when the text is selected, the zero-width space
>is
>also selected (as it should). I have a second file
>
> gemini://gemini.conman.org/test/escape2.gemini
>
>that uses " \b" (space, backspace character) which didn't work with
>cut-n-paste (at least on Firefox on Mac OS-X) but if I viewed the
>resulting
>file in a terminal and then did a cut-n-paste, the output was as
>expected.
>
> So the question is---how often are you going to quote material where a
>line starts with ```? Is it often enough to worry about it? Or could
>you
>place the example as a plain text file and link to it?
>
> -spc
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 6
>Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 02:19:50 +0000
>From: acdw <acdw at acdw.net>
>To: gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu
>Subject: Re: Escaping in gemtext
>Message-ID: <0fb9d263-9c2e-4598-b592-b7686b34d1b8 at www.fastmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain
>
>On 2020-11-10 (Tuesday) at 02:08, Sean Conner <sean at conman.org> wrote:
>
>> So the question is---how often are you going to quote material
>where a
>> line starts with ```? Is it often enough to worry about it? Or
>could you
>> place the example as a plain text file and link to it?
>>
>> -spc
>
>10000%. The escaping suggestion has been brought up a lot, but I have
>no idea when writing a line starting with ``` is 100% necessary, and
>couldn't be prefixed with a zero-width space or even a normal space.
>Even the various "getting started with gemtext" posts, which are the
>only ones that might conceivably actually have need to do it (from my
>understanding the escaping rules in other markup are really only there
>so you can talk about the markup in the markup), get by just fine
>without doing so. Like Sean said, if it's *really* *that* *necessary*
>you can just put it in a file marked text/plain. But I really doubt
>that it is.
>
>--
>~ acdw
>acdw.net | breadpunk.club/~breadw
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 7
>Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 03:25:36 +0100
>From: Katarina Eriksson <gmym at coopdot.com>
>To: Gemini application layer protocol <gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu>
>Subject: Re: Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics
>Message-ID:
> <CAObwWNgXi_Hqt80fT_=drD7Mw3fj7a5tWc0nwz=kzxbEu7AL4Q at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
>Thomas M <thomas5max at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Other writing systems may have their
>> own way of conveying emphasis, but for the Latin script it's italics.
>>
>
>Other ways of conveying emphasis include: (in no particular order)
>
>* Capitalization: if you're writing in a language which doesn't
>capitalize
>all nouns.
>* All-uppercase: mostly interpreted as SHOUTING.
>* Letter-spacing: which looks c h o p p y and I don't know how a
>screen
>reader would interpret that.
>* Extra space around the word: awkward to write if your input device
>insists to convert the first space into a period, like some smart
>phones
>do. Same with extra space between all the words in a sequence of
>words.
>* Extra space around a sentence: looks like the convention from texts
>with
>monospace fonts where you make the transition between sentences more
>visible by adding an extra space.
>* One word per line: interrupts the flow of the text.
>(I might have forgotten one more)
>
>None of these can be automatically converted to italics and it's the
>author
>who determines which notation will fit best for each document within
>the
>constraints of the medium.
>
>--
>Katarina
>
>>
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>------------------------------
>
>Message: 8
>Date: Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:30:00 -0500
>From: Zach DeCook <zachdecook at librem.one>
>To: Gemini application layer protocol <gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu>,
> Jason McBrayer <jmcbray at carcosa.net>, raingloom <raingloom at riseup.net>
>Cc: gemini at lists.orbitalfox.eu
>Subject: Re: examples with Sympy
>Message-ID: <0DE0419F-1EE9-4A56-8A1C-E35C7BD93A62 at librem.one>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
>On November 9, 2020 6:05:41 PM EST, Jason McBrayer
><jmcbray at carcosa.net> wrote:
>>raingloom <raingloom at riseup.net> writes:
>>
>>> I have only one question: how will screen readers handle this?
>>
>>Probably very badly. Which is why I'm somewhat critical of using fixed
>>format blocks for ASCII art.
>
>>Anything which comes after the ``` characters of a line which toggles
>preformatted line *on* (i.e. the first, third, fifth, etc. toggling
>lines in a document) may be treated as "alt text" for the preformatted
>content.
>
>gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi
>
>Like
>
>```ascii art READERS are LEADERS, which my parents used to tell me
>whenever I wasn't reading a book.
> _ _ . _ _ _ _
> |_) |_ /_\ | \ |_ |_) \
> | \ |_ / \ |_/ |_ | \ _\
>
> ARE
> _ . _ _ _ _
> | |_ /_\ | \ |_ |_) \
> |__ |_ / \ |_/ |_ | \ _\
>```
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Subject: Digest Footer
>
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>------------------------------
>
>End of Gemini Digest, Vol 16, Issue 31
>**************************************
--
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 09:45:57PM -0800, peteyboy at sdf.org wrote: > I vote we leave it alone. I had all these ideas when I saw it, too, but it's really just fine as it is. As others have said, gemtext isn't the only doc format if it doesn't work for you. But for what it does, I think the design arguments ended up in a totally sweet spot for writing gemtext pages by hand. Agreed! Adding escape characters or (especially!) inline markup would not only make implementations more complex, it would make writing gemtext harder to read and write, too. I just don't feel like the trade-off is worth it. Gemtext currently feels like a very "human" format - and even something as minor as an escape character would move it out of that category, IMO... ? bie
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