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If I could add one thing to the gemtext spec, it would be a horizontal line rule (like <hr/>). You can do it manually, but you can't know how wide the reader's screen is and if you guess badly it looks weird.
2023-06-15 · 11 months ago · 🤔 1
A client could choose to display "-----" as a full-width horizontal rule. The Gemtext specification says:
> Text lines may be presented to the user in a visually pleasing manner for general reading, the precise meaning of which is at the client's discretion.
In this case, the dashes would be presented as horizontally stretched to fit the page width. One might call it "forced paragraph justification".
It wouldn't strictly be against the letter of the spec but certainly it could be interpreted as a violation in spirit...
I'm curious why you feel horizontal rules are worth adding? I haven't felt their lack, either as author or reader, but perhaps I'm missing something :)
I can't think of anything I'd like to change. Not right now, anyway ;)
The entire point of keeping the gemtext spec so limited is that it's extremely simple to parse and, perhaps more importantly, forces you to focus on your writing's actual content rather than styling. Presentation is left to the client. We don't even know if the client is displaying content visually - the client could be a screen reader and the person reading it might be non-sighted. We care about ideas and knowledge, not pixel perfect positioning and color.
This can be a difficult adjustment for a lot of people to make. On a regular basis someone brings up "that one thing that they miss in Gemtext". It's usually inline styling such as italics or bold. I can see the appeal of the horizontal rule though. But just ask yourself, does not having it take anything away from the meaning of your words? The answer is almost always "no".
Horizontal rule (---) was proposed early on as a line type for text/gemini along with ordered lists. Personally I think they would have been a useful addition to delineate content in headers/footers. Ultimately, solderpunk never latched onto the idea. I guess he didn't find them as useful & compelling as the other line types.
There's a long mailing list thread "Text reflow woes (or: I want bullets back!)" that I recommend reading if you are interested in the origins of gemtext format and how the decisions were made.
https://lists.sr.ht/~adnano/gemini/%3C20190815081859.GB26532%40SDF.ORG%3E
(part 1)
https://lists.sr.ht/~adnano/gemini/%3C1367854366.219683.1576461212912%40ichabod.co-bxl%3E
(part 2)
https://lists.sr.ht/~adnano/gemini/%3C574762512.1104.1579461314537%40ichabod.co-bxl%3E
(part 3)
> > * Add horizontal rule lines (three+ dashes)
>
> I guess this is harmless. It feels a bit to me like we're adding it
> just because Markdown has it - unlike headings and lists and even,
> occasionally, quotes, I don't know that I've ever seen a horiozontal
> rule used in Gopherspace. But I don't see a good reason to disallow it.
> - solderpunk
I’ll admit, when setting up my capsule I tried to make a HR for the header. But reading through these comments, I agree it’s not needed. It doesn’t really add anything to the document, whereas headers & bullets define structure. Some markdown renderers add an HR to H1s, so it feels like it’s more a stylistic piece (and a Gemini browser could do the same).
I can think of some uses for horizontal rules: delineating entries in a list, such as these comments, or putting a border around the preview in the Bubble draft composer.
Certainly it's not essential to have, but it does convey some useful structural information.
@skyjake yeah I can definitely see that. I was thinking of it from the perspective of a screen reader parsing a gemtext file (as I feel this medium goes hand in hand with accessible content). Everything in the current spec would be worth announcing, but I wasn’t sure an HR would be. Although with your comment example, I could see “<Comment text> <Line break> <Comment text>” being useful information.
I think horizontal rules are useful in the context of written documents, you see them in books frequently as a way of lightly splitting up chapters for example. It's kind of like a sub-header, but without having to name the sub-section.
If I was feeling spicy, I would make the argument that we shouldn't forget about the horizontal rule just because markdown has brainwashed us into thinking that heirarchies are the only way to structure digital written content :P
That said, I'm definitely aware the ship has sailed on this so I'm not really making a proposal. It was more of a one-off thought into the void :)
I like to think of <hr> as an unnamed header, as @mediocregopher suggests, when it's used to introduce a new scene or topic. In a book, this might be rendered as a line of three stars * * * instead of a solid horizontal line.
Conveniently, if that's your use-case, Gemini Text already has unnamed headers! Just make a header line (#,##,###) and don't put any text in it :)
(your rendering may vary)
horizontal lines can be achieved through a simple...
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Isn't perfect but it works...
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