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I randomly found this webpage today while I was researching some old software libraries.
It stuck out to me because how the page was structured, it felt very similar to what I see in gemini documents.
I feel like this could represent the next "logical step" for text/gemini for all the people who say "I like text/gemini, but I just wish it had...".
text/gemini + inline hyperlinks/bold/italics. Nothing else changed (pretend you didn't see the image).
I have to say, it looks pretty damn nice.
2023-08-17 · 10 months ago · 👍 ahappydeath, gemalaya · ❤ 1
Thanks!
I'd call it three changes: inline links, links to headings in the page, and bold+italics. (I didn't spot the italics, but let's assume it for the sake of argument.)
Here are my three cents ;)
-1 for inline links, I like what forcing links to their own line does both for the simplicity of the markup and for the resulting documents. I think they end up more focused on the text.
I'm neutral on links to headings as a feature, I haven't seen much call for it, which makes -1 overall as I agree with keeping things minimal.
+1 for emphasis in some way, as this seems to be something a lot of people would immediately use.
It reminds me of the faculty web pages that computer science professors sometimes have.
I appreciate the fact that this style of page can be both terse and uniquely personal.
Would be nice to have: bold/italic styling (that makes you crave markdown), page metadata (title, creation/modification date)
To be honest, I do not like inline links, but a feature that I might like is be able to control line width. Lines that contain many words usually are very exhausting for the readers and slow their reading reading pace.
@naf Line width is fortunately one of the things that clients can fully control already. Some clients have a setting for this (e.g., Preferences > Page Layout > Line width in Lagrange).
We had a lot of discussions about emphasis back on the mailing list but I'll leave you with one thought: you can just go ahead and say *this is important*. Nothing stopping ya. It doesn't need any spec rules to do it but it's been in common use in emails for 40 years. Some clients may even go the extra mile and bold the text for you (leaving the *'s in place) like you see in Thunderbird plain text emails.
Thanks @tomasino :)
Actually there is something stopping me ;) I'm too pedantic: I don't like using something with imprecise meaning and I don't like how it looks.
I don't mind it in contexts where I also used emoticons, like comments here, but for long form text ... nah. I'll stick in spec.
If Gemtext feels too restrictive, I suggest authoring your text in some other format that feels right to you. You can and should serve content in multiple formats on your capsule, if you feel that's necessary to preserve the proper formatting.
'text/gemini' is the common denominator that all clients can understand and that situation is unlikely to change, so using any other format will limit people's chances to read your content. That's why serving the same content in multiple formats is the best compromise I can see. The reader can then choose which format works best for them in their client.
Of course, the practical cost of this is that you'll need an automated way to convert between formats.
Thanks @skyjake :)
Gemtext is nevertheless my favourite format by far, so I don't think I'll branch out.
HTML has such ugly defaults that there is strong incentive to customize the style, and then you're immediately making choices that won't match anyone else's.
But Gemtext very nearly succeeds in making it about the structure and the text. Apart from emphasis ;)
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