Wikipedia lists many lightweight markup languages like AsciiDoc, MarkDown, Textile, Org-mode, reStructuredText. Not all, but many do support tables. Not sure if there's a format that many client developers would be interested to support natively. Using WebKit to render an HTML transformation sounds a bit far off for Gemini to me, although e.g. ShowDown seems like a nice MarkDown viewer without being a web browser. => https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language => https://gitlab.com/craigbarnes/showdown
On 02/01/2021 22:17, text at sdfeu.org wrote: > Wikipedia lists many lightweight markup languages like AsciiDoc, MarkDown, > Textile, Org-mode, reStructuredText. Not all, but many do support tables. > > Not sure if there's a format that many client developers would be > interested to support natively. Using WebKit to render an HTML > transformation sounds a bit far off for Gemini to me, although e.g. > ShowDown seems like a nice MarkDown viewer without being a web browser. > > => https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables > => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language > => https://gitlab.com/craigbarnes/showdown > I would not support this as a proposal for client developers to implement. Gemtext is designed how it is, limitations and all, for a reason. If all clients implemented, say, markdown or restructuredtext, that would add an incredible extra load to what clients had to do. Gemtext is gemtext. If you don't like gemtext you can serve up something else, but don't expect clients to handle it well. Regarding tables specifically, I don't see what's wrong with just using preformatted text, but that is a personal view. Nico
On Sat, 02 Jan 2021 22:32:54 +0000, Nico wrote: > Gemtext is gemtext. Yes, it's grand the way it is; I enjoy its reduced capacity. I guess clients seeing text/markdown will already offer to download the resource and the OS might offer to display the content in ShowDown or whatever ? likewise CSV/TSV and PDF, as others mentioned earlier regarding tables or documents containing tables and more.
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