Comment by 🐝 drcouzelis
Wait, wasn't markdown designed to be formatted but also nicely readable as plaintext?
Sooooo just use markdown? 🤔
Mar 24 · 6 weeks ago
Poll Results
1. I would support this
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2. I would not support this
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3. Mysterious third option (please comment!)
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38 votes were cast.
15 Later Comments ↓
🚀 SavaRocks · Mar 24 at 17:28:
I'm not sure about it. Here comes a "feature", and another one, and another and we have html with iframes, tables that break screens, and, omg, marquee ... God save us all
I for one have never shared my Gemini masterworks (opi?) on any other protocols.
This is the protocol I will die using.
I should set up a dead man's switch to post my obit when I stop playing SpellBinding or posting crap here.
One theme I keep seeing here is adding features to grow the community. A core overture of Gemini since the beginning is that it's open to all but if people don't join because of its restrictions, that's fine. Also over the years, the community has been fine with small a community, but not being exclusionary for exclusion's sake. Would bold fonts attract that much more people? No. but @solderpunk locked this train on these tracks for the ideals he set forth. the longtime residents have mostly accepted these ideals.
Some of us have even embraced these ideals.
As an aside, new Lisp programmers often come up with all kinds of 'ideas' to eliminate parentheses.
Old Lisp programmers know that Lisp is great _because_ of all those parentheses.
The lack of an official way to emphasize occasionally annoys, but *this* or _that_ should not be too hard for screen readers to deal with.
And it's better to come up with English instead of tags to emphasize anyway. I could have said "Lisp is great precisely because of parens", for instance.
🐑 zipsegv [OP] · Mar 25 at 06:30:
idk why the dicussion went towards "growth", to be honest. I don't really care about that much? There's plenty of stuff here to enjoy; I just thought, maybe it could look a little better. I don't have a strong opinion though.
@stack:
And it's better to come up with English instead of tags to emphasize anyway.
Well, the reason italics and the rest are used is to emulate features of spoken language, like most other features of written text. If I read out loud text with italics, I'm going to emphasize it in my speech by saying it for longer or adding extra pauses or whatever. So I'd argue that they basically are "English". By this logic we shouldn't have punctuation marks either.
Maybe we should recognise *emphasis* marks as _genuine_ prosodic punctuation marks at the English orthography level, intended for human consumption. Not a million miles away from how delimiting quote marks work in “air-quotes” or how questions are written in Spanish. ¿Don’t you think?
We are totally brainwashed by the idiotic debt economics which absolutely require expansion. We are so used to it that we think everything needs to expand or die. In reality stability or very slow growth is a much better goal, especiallly for systems that are not driven by fake money.
Orthographic conventions such as emphasis are certainly a part of our language (although an odd part). I am certanly not saying that we "should not have it". However minimizing it probably improves your writing style and makes text less ambiguous.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 25 at 15:31:
@stack : it's probably true that many of us, including me, would benefit from using less emphasis. In my professional writing editors often give me grief about this.On the other hand, there are occasions where emphasis is nearly essential -- particularly when you have to use a technical term which is also a regular word. You can write around this, of course, but I would say that in these cases the emphasis does not increase ambiguity.
I just can't understand how we're *still* having this discussion. This is gemini, this is gemtext, this is how they were designed and implemented and it's for a reason. If you want markdown, there's no reason you can't create your own protocol. There's a million places already to use md.
You do not necessarily need a different protocol if only the file format is changed (except possibly for some kind of changes that are closely related). (Spartan is the reverse; the protocol is changed but the file format is mostly Gemini with one difference that is related to a difference of protocol, because inputs are handled differently in Spartan than Gemini.)
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 29 at 09:11:
@TheHCO3 : I think we're still having the discussion because we all have different ideas about what Gemini should be. For many of us, it's frustrating because Gemini is so close to what we feel it should be. If Gemini were totally dysfunctional, there would be no reason to do anything other than create something entirely new. But it isn't -- and that's the problem.
One thing I really miss are in-page anchors. Lagrange, with its TOC feature, allows jumping straight to a headline within a page. This would be incredibly useful here on BBS, for long articles or even as a (working) tinylog response format.
— example.tld/article.gmi#headline
However, this is not backward compatible, so I’ll keep dreaming about it :)
🏍️ Atomic-Germ · Apr 02 at 22:32:
The extreme simplicity, as you call it, is roughly what we were working with before the web bloated all things. This isn't a great platform for desktop publishing, but html/css is. There's no reason to compete, it's a solid system as it is. Adding things like this is exactly where feature creep happens and you're watching videos in your tty before you even know it.
This isn't the tool for visual design. And you'll be happy for that when the internet backbone goes to crap and we're all using allow ad-hoc mesh.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Apr 03 at 09:43:
@Atomic-Germ : I don't think it really amounts to "feature creep" when you want your publishing platform to be as capable as WordStar 3 and a dot-matrix printer.
We could regard Gemini itself as "feature creep" from Gopher. What was wrong with Gopher, after all? It was widely used, and plenty of people said (and still say) "we don't need more than this."
🏍️ Atomic-Germ · Apr 03 at 18:36:
@lars_the_bear 🤷 Dunno it's not a democracy anyway, toss out the two cents it's nothing lost either way
Original Post
Markdown and Gemini — On a previous post, I suggested having browsers support markdown rendering. There's some discussion there, but I decided to create a new post for this to centralize discussion. I don't think the goal should be to replace gemtext—gemtext is a fine format for lots of things. I just think it would be a bit nice to have a few more features. Gemtext feels overly limiting at times and I honestly don't really like hacks like writing italics like /this/ and bold like *this*. Or...