Comment by 🎲 lab6
@lars_the_bear:
ANSI codes, favicons, and that stylesheet idea are all what I mean by the de facto spec of conventions. The letter of the law as laid down in the spec is only ever half the story. HTML’s journey went spec -> bugs and extensions -> quirks mode -> a spec for quirks mode.
By “not subject to extension”, I don’t mean there is something magical about the spec that prevents deviations, I mean extension by convention should be challenged, to avoid the fate of HTML.
Mar 22 · 7 weeks ago
Poll Results
1. I would support this
█████████▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 37%
2. I would not support this
██████████████▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 58%
3. Mysterious third option (please comment!)
█▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 5%
38 votes were cast.
37 Later Comments ↓
I love the line oriented approach of gemtext. For me this is what it makes different, easy to implement and special.
That’s why I am not a friend inline formatting or elements.
Btw. The discussion sound like a plan for the next browser war.
There is nothing stopping anyone from using the Gemini network to transmit markdown, or even HTML files. Today.
Creating another markdown flavor is a mistake. There is an XKCD just for that
— https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards_2x.png
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 22 at 18:09:
@lab6 : "I mean extension by convention should be challenged, to avoid the fate of HTML."
I agree -- change should _always_ be challenged, with the hope that only really effective change gets accepted. But I'd be reluctant, personally, to insist on _a priori_ grounds that no change can ever be beneficial enough to adopt.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 22 at 18:16:
@stack : "There is nothing stopping anyone from using the Gemini network to transmit markdown, or even HTML files."
In theory, that's true. In practice, Gemini clients don't natively support this kind of content, so there's little point using it. Links wouldn't work, for example, nor included images, unless they were on a different, non-Gemini server.
@lars_the_bear: true, but I cannot imagine a browser that would not ask you which application to open such unknown links with or just letting the OS open them using a default application.
I think it's a chicken/egg problem. If there were a lot of markdown files served on Gemini, browsers would catch up to natively support markdown...
I like ad-hoc organic decisions as opposed to some people deciding what other people need.
🐑 zipsegv [OP] · Mar 22 at 19:43:
@stack except we wouldn't be trying to cover everyone's use cases, just our's. there does exist commonmark but it's kind of a huge spec and wouldn't be compatible with existing gemtext syntax, which I think would be desirable.
Regardless, seems that most people are against creating a new format, judging by the poll, so I think I'm not going to go ahead with this.
Yeah. a lot of people come here for the minimalism. and stay because it's just enough to express their needs.
But I don't want to discourage you -- what do I know about your needs. If you come up with a brilliant subset of MD and convince Skyjake or Bluesman to add support or write your own browser, maybe it will be great.
But given where we stand today, it probably is an uphill battle
Devising a completely new lightweight markup language is an idea that is not likely to gain much support, we already have a bit too many of them.
Using Markdown as is, with its wide range of dialects, and a grammar that cannot be parsed regularly, is an idea that goes against the goals of simplicity which are deeply embedded in the culture of Gemini.
But maybe something else that already exists is a better fit?...
🐑 zipsegv [OP] · Mar 23 at 02:57:
Yeah. a lot of people come here for the minimalism.
part of why I came here too! I don't mind gemtext that much to be honest, it would just be nice to have some more option for styling without resorting to inacessible unicode hacks.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 23 at 08:07:
The comment of @zipsegv seems to match what I hear from almost everybody who uses Gemini (including me): it's basically OK, but would it be the end of the world if we could just emphasize a word or two?
While there isn't much interest in wholesale changes, I think small improvements like this have broad support.
@lars_the_bear:
And the real problem isn't that we can't emphasize a word or two, it's that without a standard DEFINITION _everyone's_ /been/ _d_o_i_n_g_ it *differently,* which is actually making the whole thing less machine readable and defies the purpose... Really, we had bold and italic on terminals back in the 1980s.
Read RFCs 7763 and 7764 and just do it. It's not hard.
Agreed, lack of _emphasis_ is a problem. Sometimes you really need to punch up a word or a phrase.
As I always grumble, gemtext may produce minimal results but does so in a maximal way: each line type must be parsed differently, consuming 0 to 3 characters, plus some types allow for dead whitespace after (but others don't). And then there is the preformatted tag rhat opens and closes, and you have to not parse for anything but the close tag inside. So you can't just parse for line starts without context.
When you are done, you are at the level of complexity of a simple Lisp interpreter, which is not complex but annoying enough that adding emphasis would be a simple check while scanning for EOL.
I agree with what @skyjake wrote in his article. I think that a good candidate would be CommonMark, because it's a strongly defined spec of Markdown:
I don't see how it would fracture the community to have 2 document formats, gemtext (mandatory to implement for any browser), and something like CommonMark. If your browser can render md, great, and if more people use md in their capsule it becomes a motivation for browser developers to implement it.
A problem with the preformatted block in Gemini is that you cannot have ``` at the beginning of a line inside of such a block. (There are also problems with the existing things it uses such as MIME and Unicode.) I had made up the Scorpion with emphasis and some other stuff, and the Scorpion conversion file is intended to make it possible to display files with unknown formats as well. (There is also the Scroll.)
However, Gemini does not need to be changed due to this; it can be used how it is despite that.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 24 at 07:09:
I don't think anybody suggests that Gemini can't be used as it is. After all, we're all using it right here.
The niggle at the back of me mind is: if it had a few extra features, would _more_ people use it? Is its lack of expressive power a disincentive? It was for me, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
❤️ fairlygood · Mar 24 at 10:47:
@lars_the_bear Completely agree.
1) I doubt anyone left Gemini because there's no bold type. I am sure some people looked and decided Gemtext is grossly inadequate, but not because any single feature.
B) Do we care if someone stomped out because there are no tables or emphasized glyphs? Minimalism and raw text are at the root of our community.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 24 at 15:56:
@stack : I guess it depends on what level of uptake you're hoping for. In my view, Gemini/Gemtext could be quite a bit more sophisticated, and _still_ be considered "minimal" by contemporary standards.
🚀 SavaRocks · Mar 24 at 16:30:
as gopher://floodgap.com says: plain text is beautiful. The gemini community grew without any other "enhancements". Why would we want to change it?
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 24 at 16:57:
@SaveRocks : because it might grow _more_ if it were more expressive? The lack of any control over formatting and emphasis isn't really a problem if you're writing every word from scratch. But it's difficult to share content between Gemini and anything else. Is that a problem? It is for me; I don't know about anybody else.
🐝 drcouzelis · Mar 24 at 17:14:
Wait, wasn't markdown designed to be formatted but also nicely readable as plaintext?
Sooooo just use markdown? 🤔
🚀 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...