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My typography rule set for creating readable, fancy gempages.
One of the most fascinating thing in gemini protocol to me is that the page appearance is generally controlled by clients, unlike the web where authors have a full controll over the page styling. That makes all capsules look the same style and gives me as a reader more controll to make it more appropriate for me. Nevertheless authors still have opportunity to make their text more readable and beatiful by playing with headers, preformatted text, links naming and etc. Despite gemtext by design is very limited it is really important to create a clean, fancy typography rules for implementation in your capsule. So, that page is dedicated to describe my vision how to do it and I will implement it in all my gempages. It is a 'live' document, which means it will be changed by time when I will receive more expirience in practical implementation.
First of all, let's describe main principles –
Because of the nature of gemini protocol it's important to test typography rules in different clients, at least two or three most well-known. I will keep in mind a few clients which I use –
By default Lagrange have additional decoration for first paragraph and, although I prefer to disable it because sometimes it makes whole page harder to read, as author I will use it for structuring pages. I will use first paragraph as a one-two sentence description of the whole page to make the reader decide whether he want to read it or not. If those decorations is disabled in lagrange or reader is using another client it's still will look good and easy to understand.
In my expirience, sometimes you get lost and forget in what domain you currently are, especially when url is extremely long and hard to read. To avoid that problem all my gempages should have "Author: Crynick" row with a link to index page of a capsule. Therefore, after a visitor read description he can go to main page if he decided to not read it. It better than just put 'go to index' text on link because you have to click on it to understand who is a author.
As for headings, I think authors should use them carefuly, because it make page hard to read when there is a lot of headings with little amount of text. So, we should try to split text on relatively big parts of text and if page not contains so much text then we just don't need them on it. I will generally use only secong-level headings '##'.
For example, I could split that page in sections like 'Introduction', 'Goals', 'Clients', 'Description', 'Headings', etc. But it completely pointless since there is no such a lot of rows in those sections and the reader can navigate throught text without it.
All links should be as more verbose as possible – to provide as more details as possible in one sentence. We need to give to a reader understanding of what is hiding behind it. Considering links to the gemtext that would be a good idea to make link text match the description in a first paragraph of that text.
For example, compare:
As for links to the media it should be even more verbose! Since media files usually take up more disk space, it should not only provide to the reader understanding of a content, but even replace it, make it unnececary to download, enough to just imagine it.
For example, compare:
Monkey with a long tail sitting in a profile on a rock with a slightly open mouth (746KB).
It's also extremely important to always specify how many disk space it takes.
I prefer to use all links descriptions as a ordinary parts of the text, i.e. put a dot in the end if it is a separate sentence. Same with list items - all text in listed items is a part of a sentence or separate sentences. That means I will use all punctuaction marks as in a plain text.
In the end of file I use link to my index page same way as in the begginig to let reader get rid of scrolling to top for navigating to my capsule.
