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From: meff <email@example.com>
Subject: Re: Simple conversions from HTML to simple markups are disappointing
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2022 20:02:52 -0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <sskc9c$962$1@dont-email.me>
On 2022-01-23, Luca Saiu <luca@ageinghacker.net> wrote:
Disgusted by the web with its anti-features, its enormous gratuitous
complexity and its essentially proprietary nature (the effort of
re-implementing a significant component from scratch is unrealistic for
single developers), I have recently opened Gemini and Gopher services
Hm I didn't think Jehova's Witnesses made it from the Web onto the net
also...
After experimenting for one day or two I have to admit that the result
is disappointing. The conversion is unnatural and I find that at the
same time some important information is lost (<tt> and <pre>) while some
which is irrelevant is preserved (icons). Having out-of-line links does
not help readability when references are numerous.
Indeed it's hard to move from HTML to more "lean" markup formats when
you are, at least somewhat, relying on the semantic information that
HTML is providing.
I have come to believe that the only really practical solution is
translating in the opposite direction: starting from a simple and clean
markup (I would say Gemini) and from that generating other simple
markups (Gopher) and the legacy system (HTML). This can and should
handle relative, intra-server links.
HTML offers semantic information in its markup and browsers can take
that semantic information and make sense of it. There's obviously a
lot of conflation between visual and semantic information in HTML, but
the semantic information present makes it hard to translate to
non-semantic markup formats. Markdown, Gemtext, etc are mostly just
visual formats (where the browser is usually fairly "dumb" about how
to display the format.) It might make sense to format your information
in a non-semantic way first and then add semantic niceities, like
<pre> afterword.
Parent: