Comment by 🚀 lars_the_bear
@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.
Mar 25 · 6 weeks ago
Poll Results
1. I would support this
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2. I would not support this
██████████████▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 58%
3. Mysterious third option (please comment!)
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38 votes were cast.
7 Later Comments ↓
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...