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Re: Gemini markup extensions [Was: Re: a solution for emphasis]

Message headers

From: Winston <wbe@UBEBLOCK.psr.com.invalid>

Subject: Re: Gemini markup extensions [Was: Re: a solution for emphasis]

Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2022 09:53:50 -0500

Message-ID: <ydwni6918h.fsf@UBEblock.psr.com>

Message content

Gustaf Erikson posted:

> This post is a bit of a joke, poking fun at the almost
> utter lack of semantic signaling in gemtext. No-one would be happier
> than me if the community could agree that words within asterisks would
> be equivalent to the <em> tag in HTML, while words within underscores
> would be <strong>, and we could rely on clients (and screenreaders!) to
> interpret them as such.

to which Luca Saiu <luca@ageinghacker.net> replied:

The fact that the delimiters “*” and “_” are symmetrical makes it
difficult to parse them and introduces the possibility of mismatches.
How would we render “*a*b*c*d”? And “*a*b*c*d*”?

I would agree that single character '*' and '_' delimiters aren't going

to work well.

Better, but maybe not perfect, would be regular expressions matching

"\w\*[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\*[.,;!]?\w"and "\w_[a-zA-Z0-9-]+_[.,;!]?\w", where

"\w" means word separator / whitespace ([ \t\n\r] etc.).

So, then,

"*SURPRISE*!!" would match (assuming word separation),

"*a*b*c*d*" would (with word separation) unambiguously be <em>a*b*c*d</em>,

"*a*b*c*d" would not match (be rendered as written), and

"Please be _very_ careful." would contain <u>very</u>.

I would think that good regular expression matching would be able to

separate the common cases from the unusual or potentially ambiguous

ones.

-WBE

Related

Parent:

Gemini markup extensions [Was: Re: a solution for emphasis] (by Luca Saiu <luca@ageinghacker.net> on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 01:36:55 +0100)

Start of thread:

a solution for emphasis (by Gustaf Erikson <gerikson@gmial.com> on Sat, 05 Feb 2022 00:13:15 +0100)

Children:

Re: Gemini markup extensions [Was: Re: a solution for emphasis] (by Winston <wbe@UBEBLOCK.psr.com.invalid> on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 10:02:45 -0500)

Re: Gemini markup extensions [Was: Re: a solution for emphasis] (by reidrac@minibox.invalid on Sat, 19 Feb 2022 15:13:54 +0000)