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[spec] Ambiguity with regards to quote lines

1. alex wennerberg (alex (a) alexwennerberg.com)

Hi all --

I noticed there may be a bit of ambiguity in the spec:

> Lines beginning with ">" are quote lines.  This line type exists so
> that advanced clients may use distinct styling to convey to readers the
> important semantic information that certain text is being quoted from
> an external source.  For example, when wrapping long lines to the the
> viewport, each resultant line may have a ">" symbol placed at the front.

What isn't clear is whether subsequent quote lines ought to be
considered as part of the same quote block, ie, say my client surrounds
quotations with " marks. Should these marks surround each line, or
surround an entire block of subsequent quote lines?

The clients that I tested did the latter, and this seems intuitively
correct, but the spec doesn't make this explicit.

Let me know what you all think.

All the best,

Alex

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2. colecmac (a) protonmail.com (colecmac (a) protonmail.com)

What Amfora does tries to stay in line with the gemtext idea that each line stands
on its own. So quote lines are wrapped, and "> " is put in front of each one. But
if there is another quote line below, that's considered a separate quote line, and
is processed separately from the others, it's not made to be part of the previous
quote somehow.

So this gemtext:

> very long quote line very long quote line very long quote line very long 
quote line very long quote line
> another quote

might be rendered like this:

> very long quote line very long quote line very long quote line
> very long quote line very long quote line
> another quote


> What isn't clear is whether subsequent quote lines ought to be
> considered as part of the same quote block, ie, say my client surrounds
> quotations with " marks. Should these marks surround each line, or
> surround an entire block of subsequent quote lines?

Despite what I said above, I think it makes sense for other clients to consider
quote lines to be part of the same block. Amfora can get away with ignoring this,
but in a GUI client that maybe puts quotes in a box or something? It would look
pretty ugly to separate them, I think.


makeworld

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3. ew.gemini (ew.gemini (a) nassur.net)

Hello Alex,


alex wennerberg writes:

> Hi all --
>
> I noticed there may be a bit of ambiguity in the spec:
>
>> Lines beginning with ">" are quote lines.  This line type exists so
>> that advanced clients may use distinct styling to convey to readers the
>> important semantic information that certain text is being quoted from
>> an external source.  For example, when wrapping long lines to the the
>> viewport, each resultant line may have a ">" symbol placed at the front.
>
> What isn't clear is whether subsequent quote lines ought to be
> considered as part of the same quote block, ie, say my client surrounds
> quotations with " marks. Should these marks surround each line, or
> surround an entire block of subsequent quote lines?
>
> The clients that I tested did the latter, and this seems intuitively
> correct, but the spec doesn't make this explicit.
>
> Let me know what you all think.

See section 5.4 of the spec.
Section 5.4.1

> In order to take full advantage of this method of text formatting, authors of
> text/gemini content SHOULD avoid hard-wrapping to a specific fixed width, in
> contrast to the convention in Gopherspace where text is typically wrapped at 80
> characters or fewer.  Instead, text which should be displayed as a contiguous
> block should be written as a single long line.

=> gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi


A line is "one" line. So "one line" starting with ">" and
optional space is a quote and is rendered as one block.
Email type quotes with ">" on every line, happen to be
subsequent blocks in gemini layout.

At least that is what I understand.

Cheers,
~ew

>
> All the best,
>
> Alex


-- 
Keep it simple!
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4. Omar Polo (op (a) omarpolo.com)


alex wennerberg <alex at alexwennerberg.com> writes:

> Hi all --
>
> I noticed there may be a bit of ambiguity in the spec:
>
>> Lines beginning with ">" are quote lines.  This line type exists so
>> that advanced clients may use distinct styling to convey to readers the
>> important semantic information that certain text is being quoted from
>> an external source.  For example, when wrapping long lines to the the
>> viewport, each resultant line may have a ">" symbol placed at the front.
>
> What isn't clear is whether subsequent quote lines ought to be
> considered as part of the same quote block, ie, say my client surrounds
> quotations with " marks. Should these marks surround each line, or
> surround an entire block of subsequent quote lines?
>
> The clients that I tested did the latter, and this seems intuitively
> correct, but the spec doesn't make this explicit.

The spec says that the only state that a parser need to keep is the one
for the preformatted block, so I guess the intention is to treat
subsequent quotes as distinct quotes, the same way subsequent paragraphs
are considered distinct.

> Let me know what you all think.
>
> All the best,
>
> Alex

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5. alex wennerberg (alex (a) alexwennerberg.com)

On Sun Jan 3, 2021 at 11:01 AM PST, ew.gemini wrote:
> > In order to take full advantage of this method of text formatting, authors of
> > text/gemini content SHOULD avoid hard-wrapping to a specific fixed width, in
> > contrast to the convention in Gopherspace where text is typically wrapped at 80
> > characters or fewer.  Instead, text which should be displayed as a contiguous
> > block should be written as a single long line.
>
> => gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi
>
>
> A line is "one" line. So "one line" starting with ">" and
> optional space is a quote and is rendered as one block.
> Email type quotes with ">" on every line, happen to be
> subsequent blocks in gemini layout.
>
> At least that is what I understand.
>
> Cheers,
> ~ew

This makes sense to me. Maybe a note could be added to the sepc about
this, since its somewhat unintuitive, e.g. different than how quote
lines work in email, etc.  Lagrange, for example, considers subsequent
quote lines as par of a block quote.

This came up when I was quoting song lyrics. A solution I suppose would
be to use a preformatted block (that's how I've encouraged my poet
friend to write whitespace-aware stanzas)

Alex

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