💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 007290.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:56:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Alan Bunbury gemini at bunburya.eu
Mon Oct 11 15:44:33 BST 2021
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
On 11/10/2021 13:51, Oliver Simmons wrote:
Clients can do what the hell they like IMO, as long as things that
transmit over the net obey the spec.
So gemtext is pretty unlimited, but making protocol requests is
strictly limited.
Something like replacing `---` is entirely a client-side thing and
affects no one but the reader.
The current spec states:
Text lines should be presented to the user, after being wrapped to the appropriate width for the client's viewport (see below). Text lines may be presented to the user in a visually pleasing manner for general reading, the precise meaning of which is at the client's discretion. For example, variable width fonts may be used, spacing may be normalised, with spaces between sentences being made wider than spacing between words, and other such typographical niceties may be applied. Clients may permit users to customise the appearance of text lines by altering the font, font size, text and background colour, etc. Authors should not expect to exercise any control over the precise rendering of their text lines, only of their actual textual content.
This gives clients a broad discretion as to what visual modifications they make to text lines by altering font size, colours, spacing, etc. It doesn't appear to go as far as permitting clients to amend or replace the actual text that appears on a text line, and appears to suggest that authors should expect to exercise control over the precise rendering of their "actual textual content". (At least, my interpretation of the second last sentence is that clients may allow users to customise appearance of text lines by altering text colour, not text itself, though I appreciate it's slightly ambiguous.)
The problem I have with separators and similar visual niceties is that they involve deleting or replacing text that was put there by the author. What if an author didn't want to put a separator there, but really wanted to put "---"? Unless the spec provides that "---" means a separator it is not reasonable to expect authors to know that.
In truth I'm not sure in what circumstances a "---" text line would be intended as something other than a separator, but I'm sure other authors are more imaginative than I am. To take another example, I have regularly encountered situations where a single * in a markdown document is incorrectly interpreted as marking the beginning of italicised text, so the rest of the document is italicised inappropriately. I'd like for that not to become commonplace in Geminispace.
Separately, on the whitespace issue, I do think it would be helpful to clarify in the spec whether whitespace is mandatory, particularly for headers. For example, should the line "#### Hello" be interpreted as (i) a level 3 header whose text is "# Hello", or (ii) a text line whose text is "#### Hello"? AFAIK that is ambiguous unless there is a clear stance on mandatory whitespace in the spec.-------------- next part --------------An HTML attachment was scrubbed...URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20211011/c08cb1f4/attachment-0001.htm>