Posted at 2020-08-03
According to gemtext's spec,
Any text following the leading "```" of a preformat toggle line which toggles preformatted mode on MAY be interpreted by the client as "alt text" pertaining to the preformatted text lines which follow the toggle line. Use of alt text is at the client's discretion,
The most obvious usages for alt-text are descriptions for ASCII-arts (which can be used by screen readers, for example) and programming language specifiers for syntax highlighting. As far as I know, there are no clients that do anything with alt-text.
In this post I'll describe some possible usages of preformatted text blocks that utilize alt-text.
```type=table +|1|2|3 1|2|3|4 2|3|4|5 3|4|5|6 ```
Turning a pseudographic representation of tables into actual tables seems like a good idea. I write tables like that in my wiki (which runs on my wiki engine that supports a version of gemtext with different link processing rules and an additional line type — transclusion lines).
```type=feeds http://example.org/feed.rss https://example.org/feed.rss gemini://example.org/feed.rss ```
Newline-separated list of feeds of the gemsite. It's not meant to be displayed by a browser but the browser may offer the user to subscribe to one of the feeds.
```type=mirrors http://example.org/hello-article.html https://example.org/hello-article.html gemini://example.net/hello-article-mirror.gmi ```
Newline-separated list of pages that are the same as the current one but are in different place. A browser may suggest a user to visit them as well.
```type=feedback Email: jon@example.org Mastodon: @jon@superexample.org Telegram: @jon ```
List of different ways to contact the author. May come in handy if the user wants to write to the author.
No, there is no need for that. These gemtext snippets kinda go against the gemini principles, in my opinion. Except for table blocks; I like them and they seem useful. I think I'll support them in MycorrhizaWiki.
By the way, the block below has `type=feedback` alt-text. It'd be great to hear your thoughts on this.
Email: bouncepaw2@ya.ru Telegram: @bouncepaw
Seems like this article started quite a discussion on the topic. There are tons of messages on the mailing list and some articles: