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A Gemini-style proposal

Charles Iliya Krempeaux cikrempeaux at gmail.com

Wed Nov 3 09:22:58 GMT 2021

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I know — but I think there is a tendency for semantic elements toeventually 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 ornot — they look like bold versions of characters. And a number of peopleare already using them as such. (There are even online tools to help peopleuse them.)

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

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 setof control codes (beyond those that came with the character set), toinclude bolding.

For example —

\e[1m

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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 bulletin the bullet list item.

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

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And yes, I know, not everyone's keyboards can easily generate U+2022. Butsome people's can. Mine can. And (if that is a concern) U+2022 could havebeen 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, theback-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?

On Wed, Nov 3, 2021, 1:38 AM dalz <gemini at alsd.eu> wrote:

𝐀, 𝗔

Those are *mathematical* bold letters, and shouldn't be used in place

of "A" as they're semantically different, they're not just a stylistic

variation. You wouldn't use "∪" in place of "U", would you? ;)

--

dalzu

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