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[users] Name for Gemini-style text with links?

Luke Emmet luke at marmaladefoo.com

Mon Feb 15 10:54:00 GMT 2021

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On 15-Feb-2021 10:30, Vasco Costa wrote:

On Mon, Feb 15, 2021 at 01:21:40AM -0800, Nathan Galt wrote:
Everyone seems to agree that HTML is hypertext, but opinions are split, to say the least, about whether Gemini text is.There may be a range of valid and invalid opinions :) but Gemini forms a hypertext system.

We are so used to the most pervasive hypertext system - the web - with its fine grained inline markup, we may not realise that it is simply one of the forms hypertext can take.

Gopher is a hypertext system too.

Is there a known word for Gemini text-style links?

They are simply hyperlinks because Gemini is hypertext. We can call them links too as that is a common enough term.

As we know, Wikipedia has its issues, but its definition of hypertext is not bad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext

"Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic
devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can
immediately access.[1] Hypertext documents are interconnected by
hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress
set, or by touching the screen."

Hypertext does have to be defined by a markup language, like the web or Gemini, but it is a good decentralised and scalable solution. Otherwise you need some sort of centralised system to define the hypertext graph - fine for small in-house hypertexts, but not scalable.

Regards

 - Luke