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Although people tend to like the simplicity of Gopher and Gemini, some people find the experience a bit underwhelming visually. Why don't we see more ASCII decorations in Geminispace?
Technically, gemtext plays nice with ASCII and ASCII art, but it's not so simple. As a matter of fact, we rarely see ASCII art or decorations in Geminispace, and there is very little discussion about how to change that. In addition to this, while ANSI is native to terminals, a lot of Gemini operates over Lagrange, which is only partly compatible with ANSI.
Historically, ASCII as a technology was more or less abandoned with the advent of the web. A lot of text tools were created in the 1970s or 80s. There has been very little innovation in the space. It seems to me that the space is ripe for innovations, if anyone were to take ASCII seriously.
For example, ANSI codes seem to me to be inefficient. They are also complex, and pose a security risk (due to cursor movement codes). There is an opportunity to define a new color ASCII art image format, something like gif, which could also be animated.
Although there is an ANSI animation format, designed by ACiD I believe, it was designed for BBS's, not the modern era. There is an opportunity for defining a new color ASCII video format. Having played with full color ASCII video, I can tell you it is incredibly inefficient. A 2-hour movie I converted at ~25 lines, was 11 GB! Surely this can be improved.
In particular it seems to me useful to define an ASCII video-podcast format that syncronizes locations in a textfile containing ASCII art, and full referenced documents (like news stories), with an audio track. This is different from an ASCII video format in that the purpose is to deliver complete and coherent documents, rather than incoherent video frames (as users move around the document). There should be some additional functionality, like highlighting, and probably a few other features.
Given new ASCII formats, there is an opportunity to write a next-generation ASCII document composer, which unites the idea of a document editor with a layered image editor, and podcasting software that enables real-time interaction with the target documents, and relevant ASCII media libraries, plugins, and players.
There could also be less ambitious projects to help bring more ASCII to Geminispace. A decorator with a few basic options might be nice. Feed your gemtext into it, and get a decorated output. An obvious decoration is to convert the title to a figlet font title. An enterprising individual could think of additional features.
May 30 · 6 weeks ago
Replacing titles with figlet fonts completely obliterates the ability of screen readers to parse them, making your page inaccessible to folks who can't see. Art plus a title is a solid middle ground. But don't get rid of your plaintext just for some visual flair that actually diminishes the experience
Yeah. Any graphical text should really have alt text attached. The bigger problem is, as you said, screen readers.
It would be ideal if when they hit that kind of preformatted text art they could just read the alt text. But then how you differentiate between that an actual preformatted text (or using ansi art to make fake tables)?
I am all for art, but let's keep it a little separate when possible. A gallery is great, but random chunks of odd characters in unexpected places make life difficult for some of us.
“Unofficial” conventions re: alt-text might solve that. Say, “ART” at the beginning makes the screen reader skip? Or at least give some indication that you are going to go in for a whole lot of garbage… So something like ```ART: A gigantic watermelon could make the browser skip the lines when feeding it to the screen reader? Would sg like this be feasible?