(originally posted in Gopherspace on 2019-07-03)
The most recently proposed syntax, which abandons the | separator and bracketing []s in favour of a short "magic string" to mark a line as a link and then just whitespace separation, seems to have been well received. Even people who are not super enthusiastic about it seem to like it better than the [|] idea, so it's a step in the right direction and I think it makes sense to adopt it.
Even if we decide to use that general system, there are details to sort out.
We need to actually choose a particular magic string. The => option seems very popular - it reminds dgold of their childhood computing experiences, and sloum has told me he likes it as well. Unlike #! I don't think it is used for anything else, which reduces the scope for misunderstanding. I know visiblink requested avoiding the use of angle brackets in the syntax as they are rarely used and hard-to-find keys compared to many other things, and I feel bad not honouring that, but every character is strange and rare to somebody. I'm still happy to hear alternative magic strings.
dgold's 2019-06-25 post mentioning the => syntax
Do we allow whitespace as the =>? Do we make whitespace after it *mandatory*. Either way, does "whitespace" mean strictly spaces or are tabs allowed too?
When I proposed this option, I put the link at the end, e.g.
=> This is my link gemini://some.host.net/some/path
which is easy to deal with in languages like Python where you can split strings "from the right" and specify that you only want one split. Sean has pointed out that, of course, the opposite order:
=> gemini://some.host.net/some/path This is my link
is just as unambiguous and would allow a more standard "left split", which many more languages have built in or easily avaialble. This *does* make a client easier to write, which means that all else being equal we should prefer it. But visiblink also expressed a preference for name-before-url order, and a little bit of research suggests that this might be more common than url-before-name order in lightweight markup languages (e.g. Markdown and rST use it), but there are exceptions too (MediaWiki and, indeed, gopher!). Do people have strong preferences on this?